by Joshua James
“These people, I swear to the Abyss,” said one of the cultists.
“Cattle, buddy. These aren’t people, they’re cattle, all lined up for the slaughter. I almost feel bad for them.”
“No reason to feel bad, man. They’re going someplace better than here. Hell, I’m jealous.”
“Jealous? Did you see the look on that mother’s face when I freed her kid?”
The one cultist laughed. “Yeah, she was not happy.”
“Of course not. These cattle are too damn dumb to see that we’re doing them a favor. I’m not jealous of them, I feel bad that they’re afraid. That they’re so ignorant. Besides, when we transition it will be at the hands of the Saviors themselves, not lined up against a wall and shot. We got it good.”
Sydal felt his fingernails digging into his palms. All he wanted to do was beat the two cultists to death, but he contained himself. Once Matthew was safe, he’d come back for them. He’d take out the whole lot of the murderers.
One of the men glanced around. He must have seen the flamethrower in the reflection of the tube’s glass. His eyes grew wide, and Sydal tensed. But then he realized the man’s expression was one of excitement.
“Holy shit! Is that a flamethrower?”
“Where the hell did you get one of those?” asked the other man.
From a bunch of assholes like you.
“I dunno, they gave it to me when I got here.”
“Lucky bastard. Man, that would’ve been so much more fun.”
“All they give us is these rifles. Good for a fight, yeah, but to slaughter cattle? They’re pretty boring.”
Sydal pictured grabbing one of the cultists by the back of his head and repeatably smashing it against the elevator door until it was nothing but gray goo and shards of skull matter. Then he’d pump a couple of bullets into the other sadistic murderer’s gut, making him bleed out and die slow. But that would inevitably raise the alarm when he was this close, so instead he forced a smile and nodded his head.
“Anyway, this is us, happy hunting,” the first one said.
The lift stopped. The doors opened, and Sydal wasn’t prepared for what he saw.
The lighting was low and pulsing. He could make out bloody smears on the walls on both sides of a hallway. Cultists covered in gore wiped themselves off with towels. Some had guns; others, machetes and large heavy hammers. Bloodcurdling screams and desperate crying assaulted his senses. He backed right into the rear of the lift, smacking against the glass.
The two men stepped clear, and the doors began to close.
In that brief moment, Sydal had a choice to make. He could let the doors close and continue to search for his son.
Or he could act.
As much as he wanted to find and save his son, he couldn’t just let innocent people die. Who could say if his son wasn’t in there somewhere? And more than anything, he couldn’t let these men live.
Sydal stepped out of the lift.
He raised his pistol and shot one of the cultists he’d just shared a short ride with in the back of the head, and he dropped instantly.
Then he shot the other in the throat. While the man clawed at his throat and tried to spin away, Sydal wrenched the man’s rifle from him and started shooting everything in the hallway that moved.
He shot the biggest threats first: the cultists with guns. There was some gunfire exchanged, but the element of surprise won out. Then the others, armed with machetes, hammers, and other savage weapons, scattered as he poured bullets into the hallway, cutting them down as they ran. Someone threw a knife at him, and it smacked off his shoulder and bounced away. Sydal screamed like an animal and fired wildly in the direction it had come from.
More men fell. The floor was thick with bodies now, and slippery with blood, as Sydal charged forward.
But he knew all the blood wasn’t from the bastards he was killing. Most of it was from their victims. He could see blood pooling at the bases of doorways that lined either side of the hallway.
He entered the first open doorway and gagged.
When Sydal had come across the pool of bodies in the water treatment plant, he’d thought he’d seen the worst of what humanity was capable of. He was wrong, so terribly wrong. Mutilated bodies littered the floor. Some were just pieces of what once were whole human beings. Others’ faces were bashed in beyond recognition. The smell was overwhelming, so strong it hit the back of Sydal’s throat and made his eyes water.
Against the far wall, a dozen naked people clung to each other. In the low light they looked like a single mass of trembling humanity covered in blood and unified in their terror.
In the middle of the room were two cultists. One of them had a fire axe, the other a machete. The latter was still hacking away at a sickly old man on the floor who tried to fight off his attacker with nothing but bloody hands. Each swing tore another deep gash into him, exposing bone.
Sydal shot the cultist in the back of his knee just as he raised his machete for another strike; then he put a bullet in the other one’s chest as he tried to rush him with the axe. One or two of the people along the far wall screamed out, but most were too traumatized to even comprehend what they were seeing.
Blinded by fury, Sydal slowly walked up to the former machete-wielding cultist, who was rolling around, crying and screaming on the floor. He begged for mercy. What he got was the detective emptying the rest of his magazine into the man’s face.
Sydal looked over at the naked innocents still pinning themselves against the far wall. There wasn’t anything he could say to them, nothing that would get through their heads at the moment, and he didn’t want to lie and assure them that everything would be okay.
Instead of lying to the survivors, Sydal dropped the rifle, since it was out of bullets. He picked up the axe. After giving them a good look and making sure Matthew wasn’t among them, he rested the axe on his shoulder and moved on to the next room.
“Matthew!” yelled Sydal as he entered the second room. It was much the same as the first, but the cultists in here cowered near the entrance.
One held what looked like a long metal pipe. On closer inspection, Sydal recognized it as a mechanic’s jack extender arm. The cultist swung it in looping arcs in Sydal’s direction. “Stay back,” he said, more pleading than demanding.
The other man with him held out a scalpel, slashing it in the air. “Please, we were….I’m just doing what I was ordered,” he said.
“Mmmhmm.” Sydal nodded his head; then he set the axe down and calmly slid the flamethrower around. Before the men seemed to understand what was happening, he leveled it at them and flicked the flame wide open.
They screamed and turned around, with nowhere to run. The man with the pipe dropped it and fell into a pile of burning flesh, then thrashed and tried to rush at Sydal. But he was blind and wounded, and Sydal calmly sidestepped the burning man. Sydal let his flamethrower drop to his side; then he grabbed the axe at his feet. With one quick motion, he plunged it into the cultist’s blackened head.
As Sydal tried to wiggle it out of his skull, the second cultist threw his useless scalpel at him and made a run for it. Leaving the axe behind, Sydal calmly left the second room and went back out into the hallway.
Desperately pounding on the lift doors, the second cultist kept looking back, more and more terrified the closer Sydal got. Sydal slid the flamethrower off his shoulder, kept walking until he was in range, and briefly squeezed the trigger again.
When he returned, Sydal was surprised to find one of the Lunar civilians, a naked young woman, holding the axe. Wide-eyed, she stared at him and shook. He held out his hand. She handed it over.
“Pick them up,” said Sydal. He was referring to the weapons that the dead cultists had dropped. The woman picked up the short knife, while a middle-aged man picked up the metal pipe.
Now three, Sydal moved on to the third of four rooms. These cultists were completely unarmed. The two civilians he’d recently rescued rushed past him.
Roaring and growling like cornered animals, they went to work on the Oblivion cultists in that room, who desperately were trying to find an exit.
Sydal didn’t stick around to see what they did to them. All he heard were their screams as he moved on to the last room.
“Matthew?” asked Sydal before entering the room.
In the fourth and last room, he’d found a room full of thankfully fully clothed, frightened children. They were in one corner as a single woman sat against one of the walls. She was crying.
Sydal ignored the woman and looked at the children. Matthew wasn’t among them. Deterred and still angry—maybe more so, seeing a room full of kids—he turned his attentions to the woman.
“I didn’t…I couldn’t hurt them,” she said. Sydal suddenly realized she had a pistol in her lap. He tensed, but she didn’t make a move for it. She was rocking back and forth, murmuring to herself.
Sydal did notice that there was no blood in this room, no signs of carnage. Still, that didn’t garner the woman any mercy. If she showed any signs of pointing the gun at him or the kids, he’d roast her alive.
“They wanted me to kill them. I just…I couldn’t. I’m not strong enough to send them to the Abyss.” The woman was a mess. Tears kept running down her cheeks, snot bubbling out her nose.
Sydal took a step to his right, then another. The flamethrower was imprecise. If he fired it from this point, he might hit some of the cowering children.
“I’m glad you didn’t,” he said, stalling for time. “You did the right thing.”
The woman looked up at him. Her face hardened. She reached for the gun.
Sydal rushed forward. “Don’t—”
Before he could finish, she shoved it in her mouth and pulled the trigger.
The children screamed as she toppled backwards.
Sydal didn’t even wait for the smoke to stop wafting out of her mouth before prying the pistol out of her hands.
Everything was painted red by the UEF base’s emergency lights. Alarms started to blare.
In a matter of minutes, UEF soldiers were sure to come flooding into this floor, and Sydal couldn’t be here when they did.
“Where are you going?” The civilian who handed Sydal’s axe back to him called out to him as he waited for the lift to return.
“To find my son,” answered Sydal.
“What should we do? Where do we go?”
He sketched out where he’d come up through the hatchway. Maybe she could lead the others there and escape. Maybe not. There wasn’t enough time for him to know or care. He had to find Matthew.
The lift arrived. “Good luck,” he said as he stepped in.
Sydal stood in the elevator, covered in blood, calmly staring at his own distorted reflection in the lift tube glass. He cracked his neck, took a deep breath, and exhaled. In the holographic display he saw the lift’s progress. His final stop was less than five seconds away. If his son wasn’t there, he didn’t know what he was going to do; but considering what he’d just done, it was going be bad.
The lift stopped.
When the doors opened up, Sydal dropped his axe and backed up against the car wall. His legs felt weak, his head light, and his throat even drier than before.
“Maria?” he gasped. “Becca?”
Sydal couldn’t believe his eyes. Standing there, waiting to greet him, were his dead wife and daughter.
They weren’t alone, though. In between them, holding both their hands, was a pale bald-headed man with a sinister smile.
Five
Standoff
Director Engano took one look at Ben as he stood in front of the assembly room, and knew he’d get no respect from the ready crew of AIC Veruvian as they settled into their seats. Some, already seated, stared at him, confused.
The mood was somber. Most of the people in that room had lost friends in the fight on Europa, Engano suspected. None of them had any illusions that their fight was over.
“My name is Ben Saito,” began Ben. “You don’t know me, but your commander asked me to come talk to you in his stead.”
“You aren’t even in uniform, for God’s sake, so I know you ain’t no damn officer,” said one of the AIC soldiers.
“Fair enough. I can go into where I’m from or what I’ve done, but really, the only thing that is important is what I know. What I know about is our new, unique enemy.”
“The only enemy I know have ‘fascist fed’ before their name,” added another soldier. A smattering of chuckles erupted from the group.
Engano stepped forward and waited a beat, so all attention shifted to her. She’d come in with Ben, and had set up the video sequence that he was about to lead the group through—the one that she’d prepared, with almost all the classified information she had on the Shapeless and the Oblivion cult.
“That’s because you haven’t faced anything like these aliens before,” she said.
“So that’s what this is.” One of the AIC soldiers stood up and looked behind him, then pointed into the crowd, ostensibly at one of his friends. “Called it. You owe me 30 credits.”
“Private Crisin, is it?” asked Engano coolly. The look she gave him could freeze boiling water. “Your family lives on Tergulon, out near the rim, right?”
The boy was a loudmouth like his father, a local elected official with a habit of starting fights that derailed his chosen profession.
Crisin looked surprised. “That’s right,” he answered warily.
“Well, Private, if you don’t sit down and listen to what Mr. Saito has to say, then I guarantee that your family on Tergulon will end up slaughtered.” Engano stared at the private until he quietly sat down.
“And that goes for all of you,” she said. “Make no mistake, this is a fight not for the AIC or UEF or even the Earth. This is a fight for our species. Keep treating it like any other fight, and it will be over quick. And so will everything you love.”
Silence descended like a curtain over the group. She knew some of that was due to her words and demeanor. Both had the practiced ability to command attention. But mostly, it was because they all knew who she was and what she knew.
“Thank you, Director,” said Ben.
Engano was already halfway to the back of the assembly room. She raised her hand and snapped, and the screens behind Ben came to life. Each one contained an image of the destroyed surface of Vassar-1. It was just the first of more than three dozen images and video clips that Ben would walk the group through.
“Listen up and listen good,” Engano said when she reached the back door. “And maybe, just maybe, you don’t all end up dead.”
She let her words hang in the air for another moment, then nodded at Ben and left.
She immediately ran into Ada, Clarissa, Congo, and Wan, who had gathered outside the assembly room.
“Director! You’re still alive?” Ada said with some surprise.
“Of course she is,” Clarissa said with a smile. “Old spies never die.”
“Old spies never retire,” Engano said. “Everyone dies.” There was an awkward silence after that. “Nonetheless, it’s nice to see you too, Agent.”
Clarissa nodded. “And you, ma’am.”
“I’d love to catch up, but I have to relay some news from Earth with our captain.”
“What happened?” asked the woman known as Congo.
Engano knew only that she was a doctor and that, like Wan, she was a pirate. But Clarissa and Ada had vouched for her.
“It looks like the battle is starting without us,” Engano said. “Oblivion cultist attacks have broken out all over Earth. We assume it’s an attempt to sow confusion ahead of the main assault. An unknown, unaccounted-for fleet also just took off from Earth’s moon. I’m pretty sure the UEF and my agents are the only ones who know. I’ve alerted Rhule, but it will take some time to inform the entire AIC fleet.”
“Shit. This is really happening, isn’t it?” asked Wan.
“Looks like it,” said Clarissa.
The pirate feigned offense, but then shrugged. “I’d love to. Where would you recommend I run to?”
“There’s nowhere to run,” Engano said. “Nowhere at all.” On that note, she spun around and headed down the hall. Over her shoulder, she said to Ada, “Ben should be done soon. All he has to do is scare the shit out of everyone in there.”
Thirty minutes passed. Wan and Congo sat on the floor across the hall from the assembly room, talking, killing time until the briefing was done. Mostly they reminisced about their crew, their dead crew.
“He really didn’t like to get up out of his damn chair,” laughed Congo, as she looked at her own hands that rested on top of her bent knees.
“No, he didn’t. Not even at the end. The crazy asshole could have disengaged from the pilot’s console if he’d just tried.” Wan shook his head bitterly. “Dumb bastard. But a hell of a pilot.”
Wan threw a coin across the hall at the main assembly room door. It clanged off of it and fell down to the floor. Then the door flew open.
Soldiers streamed out. None gave Wan or the rest of the group a second glance as they turned into the hallway and returned to their stations.
They were all silent. Too silent for Wan.
“What the hell did you tell them?” Wan asked when he saw Ben finally exit the room.
“Told them what the hell they’re up against,” Ben said. “And what’s at stake.”
“Seems like you really lit up the room,” Wan said.
Ben glanced at Ada. “Director Engano had some very detailed and very … graphic … footage from Vassar-1.”
Ada frowned. “That would do it.”
“They needed to see it,” Ben said. “And for those from Vassar-1, they needed to see what happened to their loved ones, what the Shapeless did. Now we have a motivated crew on this ship. We have motivated crews on every ship in this fleet. Or what’s left of it.”