"Vera," I said softly at first, as the lights around me flickered. I had retraced my steps back to the alien shrine where she and the others had been entombed. Rather than return through the whirlpool, I had taken an alternate route. Halfway through my return, the ship's lighting had begun to flicker and I had watched consoles start to power down. It was clear that bit by bit, Vera was powering the ship down.
When Vera did not respond to my voice, I reached out and clasp her by her dangling arm. At my touch, her eyes flickered open. At first, she smiled at me. "You are still alive, Captain."
"No thanks to your attempts to kill me," I responded. She winced, as if hurt by the statement. I didn't care anymore.
"Have you come to destroy me?" she asked, glancing at the axe I held in my hand. I had taken it from the control room, in expectation in using it to destroy the respirating column above and the remains of the shrine she was attached to. "I did not intend to kill you, Captain," she burbled, leaking milky android fluid from the corner of her mouth, "In fact, I attempted to keep you alive as long as I could."
"Yeah, sure," I responded sarcastically. "Locking me in the furnace and turning it on was a great way to save your captain."
"I did not coerce you to enter that chamber," Vera chided, "And I did not activate the thermal purge." She added, "If I could have, I would have purged the system earlier." She paused, as her eyes momentarily rolled back in her head. I grasped her arm tightly, shaking it to attempt to revive her. It seemed to work, as she seemed to regain control of her body. Her eyes locked again with mine, "As I stated previously," she lectured, "I told you I had been interrupted and prevented from performing the purge."
I was not sure if I trusted her statement. If she had not activated the ship's purge system, who had? There was no one left aboard the ship except me, her – and the alien. Could the alien have activated the system somehow? As Vera had stated earlier, did it have the crew's knowledge, including the ability to operate the ship's functions? I shuddered; it had manually opened the door to the purge chamber to get at me. "Vera," I stated, setting my jaw as I glanced at her mauled features, "I need you to reactivate the ship's systems first."
"I am dying, Captain," Vera breathed. "The ship is tied to my functions and shutting down as my own systems fail." A weary smile wavered across her lips, "As long as I live, so will you."
"Can you reactivate Uncle from here?" I asked.
"That – would not be wise, Captain," Vera warned me, coughing up several frothy bubbles.
"Why so?" I asked.
"UN-CL-33 has telemetry on the ship we released – the Sulaco," she replied, her voice cracking into a robotic baritone. "It will attempt to rendezvous to collect another specimen." She paused, then added darkly, "After all, this ship has already been compromised."
"Then I'll just have to reprogram its course," I stated defiantly.
She shook her head. As she spoke, her voice was distinctly that of Uncle, "Special Order 993. Retrieve specimen at any cost," she spoke, emphasizing the last two words. Glaring at me, she added, "Crew expendable."
"Then wipe his memory," I seethed.
She shook her head negatively. "I cannot. By the time I were to pass my functions back to UN-CL-33," she gasped, leaning against the strange shrine for support, "I will be shut down. You do not want it in control of the ship." She looked at me, and in a fading, robotic voice, said, "Goodbye…Captain."
"Vera," I roared, clenching her arm, "I order you –"
Her eyes closed as the thrum of the ship around me slowed, like a heart coming to final rest. I tugged at her arm, shouting her name, trying to force her to reawaken – to no effect.
Before the last of the light faded to nothing, I took the axe to the shrine, demolishing it. The axe cut through resin-slick leather, human remains and synthetic robotic tissue. Pipes hissed and screamed as they were severed and when I finally finished venting my frustration, the last light faded into darkness.
The only light that remained came from the submerged flashlight still attached to the pulse rifle I had cast away in the room. In the darkness, it was a faint, moon-like glow in the murky waters. I retrieved the rifle and removed the flashlight with the aid of the spike on the opposite side of the axe.
A loud, clunking noise echoed through the ship, grabbing my attention. The next moment the ship's gravity began to slowly, but noticeably fall away. Before I would be left in zero G, I raced to the ladder leading out, still clutching the axe in one hand, and slipping the small flashlight into my mouth so I could climb.
I was halfway up the ladder when gravity was finally weak enough that the drops of water in the shaft began to fall around me as if in slow motion. Already, as I forced my way through some of the drops they pooled on me before either being absorbed or slowly dripping down me in strange, vein-like runnels.
If I did not get clear of the water in the shaft and the room above me before gravity completely subsided, there was a good risk of drowning. Any water I touched would be drawn to me and begin forming a film. If enough attached itself to me, I could drown in a liquid bubble. The only good news was that in the reduced gravity, it was easy to haul myself up the ladder.
I reached the top of the ladder as the last of the ship's gravity fell away. The pool of water in the room I entered started to float and spread, and with a powerful push, I shoved against the octagonal collar around the ladder and pushed myself towards the ceiling above, hoping to outrun the spreading waters.
As I arced towards the ceiling, my leg caught on a wave of expanding water. The liquid wrapped it as if it were grabbing me, and veins of watery fluid began to snake their way up my leg, even as my brief contact slowed my ascent. I knew better than to attempt to wipe the fluid away with my hands, and waited until I contacted the ceiling before I furiously shook my leg to try and rid myself of the bubble-like coating about my leg. Below me, the waters were rising like a formless creature, intent in cornering and smothering me.
I didn't spend long trying to rid myself of the water and instead began pushing myself along the ceiling towards an exit to the room as the waters below were still expanding to fill the area below me. Space between me and the water was rapidly diminishing and I wasn't sure I would clear the area before the expanding pool reached and smothered me.
It wasn't only the rising water that concerning me, though. With the ship entirely shut down, it was only a matter of time before I would exhaust the air in the ship – or the whole ship would cool to match the cold vacuum of space outside.
There was another loud clunk that resounded through the ship, and moments later, the ship's lights slowly whirred back to life. Knowing what was coming next, I braced myself on the ceiling, even as the dark waters closed menacingly upon me. A few moments later, gravity had returned and the accumulated water collapsed towards the ship deck, as if it had been shot dead.
Uncle's cool voice echoed through the section, "System restart complete," it notated, then added, "Anomaly detected in engine systems – manual thermal unit purge advised." Another beat passed, and it concluded, "Warning – hull breech detected. Ship command section has been compromised."
"I love you too, Uncle," I breathed, allowing myself to drop to the floor and taking a moment to rest. As I pulled myself up, I felt the ship rumble as the engines roared to life. The ship was on the move. I gritted my teeth as Vera's words came back to me. With the hull breached in the command center, I could not reroute the ship or directly access Uncle to reprogram our course. But first, I needed to deal with the ventricle column in this room, before it caused another heat overload.
Grasping the axe, I made my way to the slowly breathing column. Vera warned me it would bleed, so before I took my first swing, I braced and analyzed where to start my attack. Once I was ready, I heaved the axe into the column horizontally with all my might. My teeth rattled from contacting the petrified resin, but the axe chipped and shattered the material nonetheless. The axe caught in the diaphanous, leathery material underneath, and brackish syrup leaked from the wound. The axe smoked from contact with the fluid and I withdrew it from the wound, allowing the head to drag through the water in the hopes it would dilute and cleanse the material from the axe.
I brought the axe about a second time, and when it wedged into the chitinous material, I wrenched it free, peeling a section of the hard resin back as well. Under the bright light in the room, I could make out the distinct outline of a body inside.
However, whatever was within was no longer human. As I continued to hack away at the hard outer casing and reveal the interior, it revealed a body shorn of the outer layer of skin. Thick, white capillaries ran in out of the exposed muscle, both trailing upwards and downwards. The axe had cut it in several places, where ebony oily goo oozed from within. I did not dare to touch the corrosive substance that leaked out, but used the spike on the back of the smoking axe to pull away more material until the entire corpse within was revealed. It's legs were drawn long, but crossed and its arms were pulled upward, as if it dangled from puppet's strings composed of the cream-colored veins. The outstretched arms, flayed of flesh to show the exposed muscles beneath, ended in fingers where the elongated, webbed tips ended in exposed bone.
A great cavity was torn outward from the corpse's chest, and between the strands of white veins I could see the rhythmic respiration of the body's lungs thrumming with the entire column's own inhalations and the asymmetrical pulse of an enlarged, black-veined heart.
"Holiday?" I breathed, gasping at the flayed, eyeless face. I could barely recoginize it, but it was clear it was him – or at least, his corpse. The skull had elongated back, like that of the black demon that had chased me. The elongation had also thinned the bone as well, for behind the stretched, almost crystalline structure appeared several brains. Each was closely nested one after the other, and slightly wiggled with each breath, as if they were uncomfortably whispering conspiratorially to one another.
The grinning skull of my former crewmate did not respond to my query, but continued to stare vacantly beyond me. We had found Holiday dead in his quarters about an hour after the first monstrosity had hatched from his chest. His mysterious death had inspired us to investigate the Sulaco's memory banks for an answer to his hideous death. When we had found our answer and returned to his room, the body was gone. We had assumed our predatory stowaway had consumed the corpse, as Uncle had been unable to locate a corpse via video feed. As I glanced to the wall at the security camera that was pointed directly at the column, I realized that Uncle had witnessed the entire cocooning of Holiday's corpse and had refused to reveal it. But it also occurred to me that Vera had stated that Uncle had only received the special order to preserve the creature when she had sent a query to Earth. Why had Uncle concealed this information from us earlier? Had it interfaced with something aboard the Sulaco that had prompted it to conceal this information?
Whatever the truth, Holiday was dead, but the alien had transformed his corpse into a biomechanical machine of sorts, and it was clear it was the source of control behind the creature's hatchery. I was no more killing Holiday than I was killing a coffee machine by unplugging it. Still, it did not make the task any easier, knowing this had once been a crewmate. In fact, I almost felt like I was desecrating a grave, Yet at the same time I felt relieve that I was ending whatever strange defilement the alien had enacted to turn him into a tool for its own use.
It didn't scream until the axe sliced into the abdomen and I pulled back, spilling out a mass of white intestine that had apparently been converted into a repository for more of the black, bilious material. As its monstrous screech continued, the lights to the room rose, and then began to flicker madly.
The thing's head cocked and it's eyeless gaze fell directly on me. I fell back in shock and horror as the dangling corpse began to thrash, violently seeking a way rip free of the strands that held it in place. The corpse's tendon-wrapped maw gaped as a piercing, inhuman screech of rage and agony escaped the lipless jaws. As I covered my ears from the wretched scream, a familiar, bone-white structure loomed outward from its agape maw, in place of a tongue. As it passed beyond the jagged teeth of the open, screaming maw, a white, meaty veil withdrew from the structure, revealing a hideous set of fanged teeth beneath it.
"Warning," Uncle's monotonous voice rang out, "Attempted computer override in progress," the voice sang out. "Command authorization requested." It was then I realized that the thing within the column was not just an isolated machine running a hatchery – somehow it was integrated into the computer system. Vera's statements came back to me. As a glanced at the crystalline skull with the nested brains within, the truth dawned on me. She hadn't been allowed to access the purge system. She hadn't activated it. It had. They were all there, together, in its head.
Gathering myself back up on my feet and clenching the axe, I lurched at the thrashing corpse, ignoring the brackish black fluid pouring into the water. I could feel the acidic, black fluid that leaked out of my former crewman sting as it contacted the flesh of my ankles. It had wrenched part of its arm free of the prison of veins, and as it shifted, I could see black, tubular piping rising from its back. Despite the growing stinging sensation, and before it could bring its arm down, I brought the axe about, aiming for the thing's neck.
My aim was true, and the axe bit into the thing's neck. Though the blow shattered the already weakened axe, but it decapitated Holiday's remains. With a shudder, the entire column shook in the creature's death throes, then it breathed no more. As more brackish fluid flowed into the pool, I hurriedly retreated to safe ground. I pulled off what clothing I could, noting several spots where it had begun to deteriorate. My lower legs ached and stung from contact with the caustic bile. However, other than sting and leave my legs red from contact, I was otherwise unharmed.
My heart was pounding in my head so violently, I almost missed the next statement from Uncle.
"Upload complete," it stated plainly.