Chapter Eleven

"Personal Log … Acting Chief Engineer Jacob Temple. It's been two days since they pulled the planet open … since the Captain died. The panic, the riots … they were nothing compared with what came after.

"Our friends, our co-workers started coming back … changed … coming back to kill us, drag us away. Rucker disappeared this morning, and I have to assume he's dead. My crew … they're starting to crack. I'm trying to keep an eye on them, but right now I have bigger problems.

"We're haemorrhaging fuel, and the primary engine is labouring. Danvers and I are going to try to reach the fuel depot to see if we can fix it. Temple out."

-Jacob Temple, Acting Chief Engineer; USG Ishimura

Hammond contacted him the second he was out of the tram. It was a little distracting to have to stop and deal with that nearly every few minutes. But there was necessity behind it. They were in hostile territory with an unknown number of mutant alien creatures running around hunting them. And with what Isaac had to do now—fix the engines—it would be advantageous to have as much information about the problem as possible.

"We've got two problems," Hammond started, his face morphing back and forth between irritation, concern, and relief, "and we're working on borrowed time, here."

"Give me the heads up," Isaac said. If there was one thing the course of this mission had taught him thus far, it was how to multitask effectively. He kept an eye on the holo that had popped up with the comm. linkage, but at the same time he loaded a new charge pack into the plasma cutter and proceeded slowly across the deck to the hallway exit.

"First; there's no fuel in the engines. Second; the gravity centrifugeisoffline … which means that there's a couple of trillion tonnes of rock pulling us down."

"Great," Isaac muttered, "nothing too difficult, then."

"I need you to get that centrifuge operational—that probably goes without saying for someone of your knowledge base, though—refuel the main engine, and then fire it up so I can stabilise the ship's orbit."

"No problem. Let me know when other developments arise." Hammond nodded, and then disappeared as he cut the link.

When the door opened, he stepped through it, finding himself in another corridor that veered off to the right at its end. He followed it through at an even pace, his eyes darting left and right, checking for threats. But there were none.

The hallway opened up into the main control room, and Isaac stopped in main chamber to look around. The control room was directly opposite of the corridor he'd come out from. Several control panels were busted, non-functional. One of the holo panels was on, but a quick check found that its systems were inaccessible. There was a body in the chair—human, but so mutilated and bloodied that whoever it had been had clearly suffered. Lockers were open and empty, diagnostic units were non-functional as well. To the left of the corridor as he'd left it was a small inlet with a lift that led to Centrifuge Control. There was a large, round blast door a few meters from the inlet which led to the engine bay proper, and the door on the right of the corridor went to the Machine Shop. Isaac knew all this without having to check the LEDs. As an engineer, these areas of the ship had been where he'd performed most of his duties during his assignment to the crew.

He decided to go to the Machine Shop first, and opened the door once he reached it without delay. The chamber he came into was dark, but not entirely without lighting. He made his way down the ramp without an issue. Weaving through the heavy machinery into an open space at the other end of the floor, he saw an unlocked door to the left. A repair bench was opposite him, and he went straight to it—he didn't know how much damage the confrontation with mutant-Mathius had caused his RIG.

The bench was already powered, and it went to work on him quickly. As it turned out, there had been a couple of ruptures in the outer shell of the RIG, and some smaller, less important systems had taken a bit of damage. The bench supplied him with a new kinesis unit, as the one he'd had had been destroyed entirely by the earlier confrontation. Med gel was inserted into the autoloader slot. When the arms retracted, Isaac stepped away and made for the door.

The floor beyond it was grilled, and not knowing what to expect of its stability, Isaac tread carefully down the short corridor to the split at the end. Loud scrabbling sounds drew his attention downwards, and he saw what looked like one of the tailed mutants climbing around underneath him quickly, using the grills as holding points as it swung like an ape.

To the right was a safety rail running along the catwalk, and a large chasm clouded in steam and fog. Isaac went left instead, down the slanted walk and then up another one at the other end. He was met with more grills and darkness.

But a shuffling seemed alive in that darkness—more than just the shadow of something that shifted under the breeze of a vent, or a cloud of smoke or steam curling up from the floor. It shifted with the ungainly squishiness of the creatures that were an infestation on the ship. Isaac reacted instinctively, bringing his plasma cutter to bear and firing off three quick bursts. The hunk of mutated, exposed soft tissue and liquefied internal organs screeched a denial and fell backwards over the railing, disappearing down below in the roiling condensation of the cooled engines. Only after a minute did he hear the soft thud as the mass hit the lowest part of the great chamber.

Satisfied, he turned left again towards the controls for the transport gondola. The holo showed a schematic of the gondola. Across the schematic flashed the word MALFUNCTION in red block letters.

"Fucking great," Isaac whispered to himself, looking around.

To the immediate right of him was where he would normally board the gondola. But it was several meters away from the platform, the boom gate down to stop him from accidentally stepping over the edge and plummeting to a squishy death far below. He could see in the dimly lit chamber the blood and gore covering the deck of the gondola. Someone had been butchered on it.

Isaac keyed the kinesis unit for extra power and stretched out his hand. Flexing his fingers, he extended the field of kinetic energy out to the gondola until he felt it snag. His arm suddenly felt as though he held a half-tonne of weight, but as though gravity were pulling on it laterally, rather than as it should have been. But he kept his arm up, with as much effort and assistance from his RIG as he could. He flexed his fingers again and the kinetic field began to retract, shrinking back into the palm of his glove. In response, there was a screeching sound—metal on metal—and the gondola came towards him, slowly.

It came to a clanging halt flush against the platform. The boom arm swung up and open. Isaac lowered his arm and keyed the kinesis unit into standby mode before he stepped onto the solid steel deck of the gondola. Under normal circumstances, he might even have moved the body parts off the deck onto the grill walkway. But circumstances aboard the Ishimura were hardly normal. Isaac couldn't take any chances, and so he kicked the body over the edge. He didn't watch it fall, slightly disgusted with his own actions.

The holocontrols on the gondola were still functional. So he entered in the sequence to lower the boom arm once more and take him across the chasm to the other side of engineering. With a jolt, the transport started to move.

He was halfway across when he heard it: a terrible growl that echoed around the engineering chamber and seemed to come at him from all sides. Low and guttural, it reminded him of the thing that had been Captain Mathius.

"KYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYNE!" The reminder of Mathius's alterations came unbidden to Isaac's mind, and he shook his head to clear it of the myriad of images flashing behind his eyes. Mathius had been a great man, a great captain. To see what had become of him only heightened the level of anxiety Isaac had been feeling about this whole mission since they'd intercepted Nicole's recording in shock space.

If Mathius could be changed … no. Isaac refused to believe it. Nicole was alive somewhere. Alive and herself. There had to be no doubt in his mind or else he would lose all desire to function. He would lose all sense for the mission, and therefore he would never know for sure because he would never find her.

He knew he would.

He knew he must.

The other side was coming into view now; the steam parted ahead of the gondola as if it knew he wanted to see what lay ahead. More darkness, he saw. More darkness and moving shadows.

He raised the plasma cutter, checked its charge and slipped a fresh pack from his belt—the current charge pack only had a couple of shots left and he might need a quick reload.

Three shadows came out of the darkness on the catwalk he was approaching. All of them were emaciated vestiges of humanity. One had a jaw missing, with strands of muscle and the remnants of a tongue hanging loose in its place. Teeth were gone, either pulled out or fallen out from the change Isaac had no idea. Another's midsection was more or less gone, torn away in parts and liquefied until there was almost nothing but the spinal column there. The top of another's head had been sliced clean off by some kind of saw, and an eyeball hung loose by a thread from its socket. Spikes stuck out of the shoulders and their arms were little more than tiny protuberances from their abdomens.

All three of them stood more or less still on the platform ahead, looking across at Isaac as he approached them with looks of hunger on their repulsive faces.

Isaac didn't hesitate. He couldn't bring himself to analyse them for signs to tell him who they had once been. He didn't really want to know. It would only make it that much harder to do what he had to. Instead he fired. Two plasma charges caught the first of the creatures, one in the head and one in the chest. Its head exploded, but the body remained upright, its bladed arms slashing in the air in an angry retaliation of a prey it could no longer see—if indeed the creatures could see. The third missed and sailed over its shoulder, fizzing out against the wall meters behind it.

Quickly, Isaac ejected the charge pack and slipped in the new one. Locking it in, he squeezed the trigger again and again and again, emptying the entire charge into the trio of offending creatures. Heads exploded, limbs were severed, and two of them fell over the rail to fall into blackness. The other keeled over backwards and crashed into the deck, twitching once before falling completely motionless.

When the gondola came to a stop against the platform seconds later, Isaac did his best to trample all over the corpse to ensure it posed no threat. The stacks nearby held a bunch of crates, and so he walked on over and searched the ones that looked unmolested. Inside, he found a few more plasma charges for his cutter and another stasis unit. Thanking his luck, he pressed on.

Something on the ground, at the top of the ramp, flashed at him. It wasn't overly bright, but in the darkness of the engineering section it stood out like a star in space. Isaac bent low to pick it up, exposing himself to attack for only an instant and fully aware of it. Turning the object over in his hand, it saw it was a bloody log chip. The body next to it had obviously either recorded it or was taking it somewhere. Isaac slipped it into the reader in his RIG and listened while he walked.

"Never should have let him live. Never should have let him live."

"Shut it, Danvers! Shut … it! Engineering log; Temple reporting. Someone has shut off the fuel lines to the primary engine, and damaged the valves in the process. They need to be repaired before I can reopen them, but we're running out of time. With the engine offline, orbit decay will begin in less than ten hours. I just can't understand who would do this. If it's one of those crazy Unitologist bastards, I'll break their neck!"

"Henderson said they were coming. We never should have let him live."

"Shut up, Danvers. Help me with the tools! Temple out."

"Unitologists? Jacob you idiot!" Jacob Temple was someone Isaac knew well. They'd been friends working in the engineering section when he'd been stationed on the Ishimura. He'd been known for his wild theories, but he was a great engineer. It was even said that Temple would make chief if he stayed on board the Ishimura for a few more years. This … Danvers, though, was someone new. Isaac had never heard the name even in passing during his tour aboard. He reasoned that the engineer had been assigned to the crew after Isaac had left.

Isaac pressed on, despite the distraction; walking past a vent that was busted outwards, around a few corners and over the squelchy remains of a few engineers who hadn't gotten away from the creatures fast enough.

"Hammond," he said, keying his comm. unit in to the Kellion's crew channel. "I'm at the fuel station in engineering. I picked up a log chip on my way here from one of the engineers." Isaac knew there was no need to mention Temple. Hammond would have no idea who that was unless he'd been given a full list of the Ishimura's crew. "Apparently the fuel was shut off on purpose—sabotage. The valves have been damaged but I should be able to reroute through secondaries from here. I'll let you know if I need any help."

"That's fine, Isaac. Be quick about it. I don't know how long I can hold my position here."

"Got it. Any word on Miss Daniels?" He had to ask, though there was a part of him that didn't particularly care right at that moment—not while there were more pressing issues to see to first.

"No, not yet. I'll let you know when that changes. Hammond out."

The comm. line went silent again. Isaac sighed and rounded another corner. The valve controls were just in front of him now. A deactivated holo control panel was to the right of it.

The release was a simple mechanism. Straight up and down, it was only slightly taller than Isaac was. The lever that would release fuel through the valves into the engines was at the top of the slide. It needed to be on the bottom, where it would slot into the circuit and trip the release. So Isaac did that; he reached up with both hands and pulled down on the lever until it was securely slotted into the circuit at the bottom. The entire panel glowed, and a light flashed from the ceiling of the cavernous chamber beyond.

An alert sounded and an automated voice came over the announcement speakers. "Refuelling sequence activated."

He backtracked across the chasm and took another turn, passing storage rooms and stepping over empty crates thrown over the floor. Down the bottom of a sloping walk, he saw another release, and headed for it. He pulled down on this release same as the one on the other side of the engineering section and waited for the audible click that signified it was in place.

Once again, lights flashed and an alert went off, preceding the announced, "Refuelling sequence activated. Sufficient fuel to fire primary engine."

Isaac's comm. blinked and he answered it right away. "Whatever you did, it's working, Isaac." Hammond's voice was crackly over the link this time, as if something was temporarily disrupting communications. "I have a fuel reading. It's only quarter-full, but that should be enough to restore orbit once you bring the engines online. What the hell?"

"Hammond? What is it?"

A sigh was the first response he got. Then, "False alarm. I thought I saw something." And then he was gone again.

"For fuck sake," Isaac swore, annoyed by the sudden severing of the link. He'd have to have words with Hammond about that when he met up with him on the bridge. But first things first … the engines needed to be restarted.

He headed back to the control room via a nearby corridor, and came out of it just outside the central control room. Through the window was a sight he was hoping he wouldn't have to see again so soon—if ever. Another of the batlike creatures was in there, its fleshy wings wrapped around the corpse Isaac had seen in the chair before. The long spike had drilled its way deep into the skull of the body and both it and the thing holding it semi-upright were twitching madly on the spot.

Isaac restrained the urge to vomit again on the spot. It was disgusting to have to watch this again so soon after he'd seen it happen to Captain Mathius. Yellow gunk oozed out around the spike and bubbled out from the mouth. Isaac had no idea what it was, but he knew it wasn't normal to the human condition.

As soon as it had started, it was over. The thing released the body and flew away to find another victim. The body continued to twitch and writhe on the floor when it had been abandoned, and Isaac watched, disgusted and horrified, as the changes began. Soon, even they were over, and the body was barely even human anymore.

Without supporting itself with its arms, it swung up onto two horribly fleshy feet and turned to look at him. Both of its human eyes were intact, but its jaw hung loosely from where it had been. Tissue and fat had atrophied, giving it a somewhat mummified look, and the long spikes protruding from its shoulders glistened with blood.

Knowing he was going to have to go in there anyway to get to the centrifuge, Isaac steeled his resolve and loaded another charge into the plasma cutter. Then he rounded the control room and opened the door for entry.

Immediately, he was set upon by the both of them. The walker lunged at him with a furious scream, but Isaac dropped it with two shots—one that severed both legs and one that blew its head into tiny chunks all over the wall behind it. The flier came at him faster after that, its long spike extending from the top of its body, barbed and dripping with that yellow gunk. Isaac fired three shots into the thing's torso before he scored a fourth hit at the base of the spike. The thing snapped off and the flier dropped to the deck and hit with a wet sound. Isaac stomped on it several times to make sure it wouldn't threaten him again before he went on.