Hey, guys, X-Wolf here, here to bring you the thrilling and long-awaited final installment of Dead Space: Trio! Yaay!
I'm actually pretty excited that I finally managed to finish the project. My first complete fanfic! Woohoo!
That's all I have to say for now. I'll let you get on to reading. Oh, and the whole entire chapter is post-event recap. Just a "JSYK."
Well, as you may have guessed, I didn't die. Otherwise, how the hell would you be reading this?
Excuse me. I'll just continue on where I left off.
I closed my eyes and prepared for a painful death. But it didn't come. I slowly opened my eyes to see what had happened. Kneeling over me was a necromorph, drooling gore onto the chest piece of my RIG, completely still and silent. It wasn't sinking its long and sharp arms into my chest, it wasn't biting into my head, it wasn't doing anything. Neither were any of the other ones. They were all frozen. I looked at Gunner and Titan, who were equally still.
"Does anybody know what the fuck is happening right now?" I screamed at them, my voice breaking multiple times. They both shook their heads frantically.
"You might as well get the hell away from them, though. It couldn't hurt." Gunner said surprisingly calmly. I couldn't have agreed more. I slid myself backwards until I wasn't underneath a bunch of necromorphs anymore and stood shakily to my feet. I hurriedly rejoined Gunner and Titan and we jogged to the shuttle, looking behind us every once in a while to make sure that the necromorphs weren't giving chase. As we came to the bottom of the shuttle, Gunner began typing in some hacking code to open the doors of the shuttle and grant our RIGs full access to it. When he had succeeded, the bottom of the shuttle hissed and swung downward to the floor of the bay, forming a ramp into the depths of the shuttle. As we stepped onto it and it hissed slowly back up, the necromorphs suddenly un-froze and began sprinting out of the bay.
"God damn, that was creepy. What do you think that was for?" I asked.
"I see two distinct possibilities." Said Titan slowly. "And neither of them are good. Possibility one: Something was big enough to scare the necromorphs out of the bay. Possibility two: Something was big enough to call the necromorphs to it. Either way, we're dealing with one bad-ass motherfucker. Let's get off this rock."
"Agreed." I said. "But, Gunner, didn't you say you wanted to stay here?"
"Ah, Terrance. Clearly you don't know me. I was a naive fool all those days ago. In my youth I was when I said that. But I'm a changed man. With a grand total of twenty-thousand credits, you can purchase my services as a pilot." Gunner responded.
"I don't know if that was supposed to be a joke, but it was not funny, and we need to leave now, so let's go." Titan said gruffly, walking toward the cockpit. Gunner and I followed hurriedly.
When we had flown from the transport bay and gotten maybe a half a mile from Titan Station, we all looked back at the hell we left behind. We flew away at top speed for another ten minutes, staring ahead into the blackness of space, when suddenly a flash of light appeared behind us. We all turned around and couldn't believe what we were seeing. Smack dab in the middle of The Sprawl an explosion was ensuing that was all-consuming, spreading rapidly throughout the rest of Titan Station.
"What the -" Gunner started.
"- fuck, we know." Titan finished.
"Well, I'm glad we left before that happened." I said drily.
"Me too."
We continued soaring through space, alternately discussing where we were going to plot a course for and staring at the still-happening explosion in The Sprawl, which was now the size of a credit chip. Suddenly, something on the dashboard blipped. Gunner looked at it in shock.
"Another ship left The Sprawl!" He shouted excitedly. "We weren't alone after all!"
"What do you know." Titan said uninterestedly.
"This is - Should we try and establish a com-link with them?" Gunner asked loudly.
"No. Let's not do that." I said forcefully. "Let's just keep going. I don't want to get sucked back there again."
"Fine." Gunner said disappointedly. "You're the boss."
"Thank you."
We flew for another half an hour before something phenomenal happened: We received a transmission request.
"Should we?" Gunner asked.
"Yes." Said Titan before I could interject.
"I don't think -" I began.
"Fuck you. Accept it or I will." Titan said quickly.
"Sounds good." Gunner muttered, hitting the "Accept" button on a holographic pad in front of him. A screen appeared on the windshield of the ship, bringing with it the image of a motherly-looking lady.
"Hello! Hello, ship! Do you read?" She said frantically.
"We read! We read!" Gunner said.
"Did you come from Titan Station?" She asked.
"Yes, we did." Titan replied. The woman breathed a sigh of relief.
"More survivors!" She called to some unseen people, who cheered excitedly. "We just found two ships in the span of ten minutes. Maybe there will be more!"
"I seriously doubt it." I muttered under my breath. Thankfully, the woman didn't hear me.
"Alright. I have to ask two questions. Do you know or is there on your ship somebody named 'Isaac Clarke?'" She asked. A small picture appeared on the bottom-right of the screen of a handsome man who looked to be in his forties.
"No. Why?" Gunner asked.
"We believe he is the one who caused the explosion on The Sprawl."
"Good man." Titan said.
"Excuse me?" The woman said angrily.
"I said 'Good Man.' That place needed to go. Do you have any idea what was on there?" Titan replied.
"Millions of innocent people!" The woman said indignantly.
"At one point in time, that was true. But they were transformed. Transformed into these things - Space zombies, you might call them." I said.
"I don't know what you're talking about." The woman said. "All that happened was a terrorist blew the station up, killing millions of innocent women, children, and elderly. The terrorist in question was someone named Isaac Clarke."
"I don't think that's what happened, ma'am. Mainly because we were on the fucking rock for three fucking days with all of those fucking things everywhere." Titan said loudly.
"Please keep this civil, sir. Oh, excuse me." The woman said, looking somewhere off-screen. She nodded like she was listening to someone speak. "Please give us your exact coordinates and stay where you are. A ship will come to pick you up and bring you here."
"Why can't we just go to where you are in this ship?" Gunner asked suspiciously.
"Because that ship does not have enough fuel to reach us. We are three days away at top speed without shocking out, and your ship is not equipped with the proper equipment to do so. Don't worry, someone will be there with you within fifteen minutes. Please stay where you are and give us your coordinates."
"Alright, okay." Gunner hit a few buttons on the command screen in front of him and the ship shuddered to a halt. He typed in our coordinates and sent them to the woman.
"We didn't get your name." Said Titan quietly.
"Excuse me?" The woman said.
"We didn't get your name." Titan repeated, louder this time.
"It's Dr. Marks. Dr. Matilda Marks." The woman, Matilda Marks, said.
"Thank you. I'm Titan, that's Gunner, and that's Terrance." Titan said briefly, pointing at who he was naming as he said the name.
"And thank you." Said Dr. Marks. "We'll see you soon."
"Sounds good." I said as Gunner terminated the transmission. Suddenly, we all lurched backward as a horrible grinding sound went off from the back of the shuttle.
"Oh, fuck, that didn't sound good!" Titan panicked. Indeed, the command screens were flickering.
"No, you're right, it didn't! I'm checking the bios now." Gunner said quickly as he frantically typed on the emergency physical keyboard. A real screen opened up on the dashboard, and a schematic of the shuttle appeared on it with lots and lots of information all around it. "Something small crashed into the back of our shuttle. It came from Titan Station. It's been 'following' us for miles, on the same trajectory as us, but we were moving faster than it - until now."
"Well, what is it?" I asked.
"It's just debris." Gunner replied. "Hang on, I'm going to make some quick repairs. It'll only take about five minutes, but it's necessary. We're running out of air quickly, here. It breached the hull." Gunner walked to the back of his ship and disappeared. True to his word, he returned five minutes later, but he was holding a large golden chunk of what looked like a mixture of metal and rock. It had some very strange, glowing symbols on it that I couldn't understand.
"Look what I found, John!" Said Gunner in a strange voice.
"Gunner? Who is John?" Titan said nervously. Gunner didn't seem to hear. His helmet receded into his RIG.
"I found a rock, John, I found a rock!"
"Something's wrong. Look at his eyes." I said, raising my line gun nervously.
"Don't shoot!" Titan hissed, though he raised a pair of plasma cutters as well.
"You want me to what?" Gunner said, a strange look crossing his eyes. "Okay, if you say so, John." Gunner raised his plasma cutter and pointed it directly at Titan, who began shouting not to shoot. Gunner couldn't hear him, though. I made some quick calculations in my head and deduced that the first shot would not penetrate Titan's RIG, but my line gun blast would cut immediately through Gunner's. If Gunner shot, I would kill him. I told Titan this, but it didn't seem to allay his fear at all.
"Wait a second, John . . . Didn't you die?" Gunner said, his face twisting. He began to shake violently, the plasma cutter dropping from his hand, sweat pouring in rivulets from his face. "Yes you did, John! I saw it! John, no! No, John, no! Put the gun down!" But it had been Gunner who had picked up the plasma cutter and pointed it as his own neck. "John, no!" Gunner began pushing his arm away from himself, managing to push the gun so that if it fired it would not hit him. Just in time, too, as three blasts fired from the gun, missing and hitting the wall behind Gunner.
"Help him!" Screamed Titan, wrenching the plasma cutter from Gunner's hand and hurling it across the floor.
"The rock!" I yelled, understanding. I grabbed the rock and hauled it from Gunner's extremely reluctant grasp. Suddenly, everything froze. I looked around in wonder. I heard voices echoing from my head - they sounded vaguely like Titan's and Gunner's, but I couldn't hear what they were saying. Besides, they were both frozen. I walked around the cockpit of the ship, suddenly seeing something strange. It was glowing orange, under one of the pilot's seats. Confused, I took a closer look. It was a glowing symbol - one of the ones that was on the strange rock Gunner found. The strange rock! Where'd it go? It was gone. I looked around for it, but it was nowhere in sight. I returned my attention to the glowing symbol under the seat. It looked so big and open, but it was only one glyph in the floor. But it did look so big and open. So big . . . and open . . . I leaned toward it, and suddenly fell into it. I fell through orange light - falling, falling, falling - and then suddenly I was back in the cockpit of the shuttle, the strange rock on the ground at my feet, Gunner and Titan standing by me, panting heavily.
"What happened?" I asked.
"The rock . . . it . . . takes over your mind bleaaaaargh!" Gunner said, but suddenly two long, thin arms that ended in razor-sharp bones erupted from his shoulders and his helmet exploded off of his face, revealing the mutilated head of a necromorph.
I awoke hours later in a soft white bed, RIGless and confused. I had an IV attached to me, and some kind of equipment wrapped around my head. Titan, RIGless as well, was sitting by me in a small chair. Gunner was on his other side.
"Be careful!" I shouted. "Gunner's a -"
"No, he's not. It was all in your head. That rock did it to you. It messes with people's minds." Titan said soothingly.
"What? The rock?" Suddenly it all came back to me. The rock, Gunner acting weirdly, then my grabbing it . . . and then the vision. It came back so vividly I wondered if it weren't happening again. After coming to terms with the fact that I was, indeed, in reality, I began talking to Titan about what had happened after I blacked out. As it happened, I collapsed, dropping the rock, and Gunner told Titan not to touch it. They waited for a few minutes until a large transport ship shocked in a few miles away from our little shuttle. Gunner opened the hatch and told Titan to kick the rock out of our shuttle, touching it as little as possible. After they did that, they flew to the ship and docked within it, where they were shocked back to a place called Rhea Station, which was on the other side of Saturn on the still-intact moon Rhea. There, we had all gotten emergency physical treatment, and after that, Gunner and I got sent to the mental ward to be placed under the care of neuroscientist Dr. James Lough, who diagnosed us with post-traumatic shock. We had received proper treatment and were expected to fully recover soon.
"That's it?" I asked Titan after he was done. Titan nodded. "Has Gunner been awake yet?"
"No. His condition was much worse than yours. Apparently, the rock made him see his little brother who died when he was five. It was a pretty stressful experience for him." Titan said. I looked around the room again to see that it was relatively small. It was all light blue, and the floor was heavily carpeted. The roof had holographic clouds floating across it. All in all, it was a very peaceful, calming, and relaxing room. There was a door and two fake windows. The windows showed a grassy meadow with abundant flowers, all swaying in a gentle breeze. The door was light blue as well.
The door hissed open, then, and I saw a man in a white long jacket - wearing white everything from pants to undershirt - walk in. A small name tag on the left side of his chest identified him as Dr. Lough.
"Hello, there, Titan. I see that Terrance is awake. How are you, Terrance?" Dr. Lough said. His voice was very light and pleasing, and he spoke in a calm and bolstering voice.
"I'm fine. When will Gunner be up again?"
"It shouldn't be too long. Maybe in the next day or so? Now, Terrance, I need to talk to you. Alone. Titan, if you would wait outside?" Dr. Lough said. Titan left the room. "Good. Now, I need you to recount exactly what happened after you touched the Marker fragment."
"The what?" By that point, I was very confused.
"The Marker fragment. The black thing you had?" Dr. Lough said. "Don't worry, I won't tell anyone about it. I am a Unitologist, and the Marker is the center of my religion. There was a Marker on Titan Station. It gives visions to people. There, however, is an anti-Unitology group out there, and they did not want the Convergence to occur. So they destroyed the Marker. You and Gunner . . . You have messages that the Marker left for me to find. I need to decipher it, so that I can pass it on to the rest of my people."
"The . . . Marker? You mean the golden rock?" I asked. Dr. Lough nodded. So I recounted to him my entire vision, front to back, in great detail. When I finished, Dr. Lough left, and Titan came back in.
"So, what will we do when Gunner wakes up? We need a plan." I said.
"I agree. I think that we should get new RIGs, stock up on supplies, buy a shock-worthy ship, and then . . . I don't know." Titan said.
"But wait . . . I do. I'll request a council with the C.E.O of the United Miners' Association and tell him about what happened. He might be able to help us out." I said excitedly.
"Perfect. At least it's something else to strive for." Titan replied.
"Now all we have to do is buy the stuff and wait for Gunner to wake up."
"I'll go out and get what we need. You should rest while you still can. You certainly took a beating in the last few days." Titan said, walking out of the room once more.
Three days later, Gunner was up and about once more. We made to check out of the hospital building we were in, but when we tried, three security officers came up to us.
"Sorry, but we can't let you out." They said. They wore security RIGs, and had a divet each.
"Sorry, but that's not up to you." Titan growled menacingly. "You let us out now, or we'll be forced to get violent."
"We can't let you out." One of the security officers repeated.
"Okay." Titan and Gunner stepped forward. "We've got training for this, Terrance. You stay back." The two then went into action. Titan first grabbed one of the guard's divets, shot the guard in the head, and put three rounds into another one with its secondary firing mode, which shoots three-round bursts. Gunner, however, had a bit more difficulty: The officer he went after had already grabbed his divet. Gunner dove under a soaring lead bullet that sank into the ground beside my foot and grabbed the officer's wrist, who began pulling the trigger randomly. Gunner twisted and flipped the officer over his shoulder, and began slamming the officer's hand on the ground repeatedly until the divet came free. Gunner then put two rounds in the officer's heart and one in his head, typic sure-kill style.
"Let's move." Said Gunner, tossing me the third divet.
"Was that necessary, guys?" I said as we sprinted to the hospital's elevator.
"They were looking for trouble." Said Gunner as the elevator doors closed. Gunner removed the control panel, rewired a few things, and touched two wires together. The elevator began moving upward quickly.
"What did you do?" Titan asked.
"I overrode the authorization requirement to get to the roof." He replied. A few seconds later, the doors hissed open once more, and we were on the triangular hospital building's roof. There were two security officers guarding a small transport helicopter. Gunner sank a slug into one of the officer's chest, while Titan motioned for me to get the other one while he watched our backs. It took me three shots, but I finally managed to bring the second one down.
"Let's move." Said Gunner as we sprinted to the helicopter, which had two rotors: One on each side of the thing, like an Osprey. Gunner hopped into the cockpit of the white-with-red-crosses helicopter while Titan and I got in the back of it. Gunner piloted us expertly to a small mini-mall on the outskirts of Rhea Station. We weren't on the public wanted list yet, so we quickly got our RIGs and weaponry. Feeling a lot better and more secure then, we took the helicopter to the shipyard. Gunner purchased the ship while Titan and I watched carefully, weapons at the ready, for any signs of trouble. When Gunner had successfully negotiated the price, we hopped onto the standard transport ship we had just purchased and high-tailed it away from Rhea Station as fast as possible. I looked back at the shrinking moon Rhea and reflected on what the hell had just happened to me.
Alright! Way to bring a series to a conclusion, right?
Now, most of you are currently sobbing hysterically because Dead Space: Trio is over and done with. Well, don't be. I've already written a small short story to bridge the gap between this series and the next (And probably last) that involves the trio. I wrote it on my iPod, though, and I can't find it as of the instant I'm typing this. Ah, well. It'll turn up in a few days . . . I hope . . . So look forward to that.
Fun fact: Dead Space: Trio was originally to be named as Dead Space: Survivor.
Aaand . . . That's it. See y'all later. Hope you liked the series and how I ended it.
Read, Share, Review, Repeat. Adios! X-Wolf out!
Hey, guys! Check out "Dead Space Trio: The First Four Days" by Rafen of the Blood, which tells the story of Terrance's first four days on Titan Sation. Go ahead, read it. I dare you. Although . . . I haven't read it yet . . . Just kidding. I'm sure it'll be fine.