Title: Year 2511 VI
Prompt: (23:00/11PM) "Coping with drastic change in a positive manner."
1. Penumbra
These men were not human. Everytime Lexine felt they were getting remotely close to her position, she felt she needed to move. There was no place for her to relocate however, their flashlight would graze the wall just above her head, but they never seemed to discover her hiding between the bed and the wall furthest in the corner, masked by a privacy curtain.
Arms wrapped around her legs, it was all she could do not to cry. The years Gabe spent teaching her how to defend herself seemed useless here; Lexine could conjure up scenarios in which she crawled out through the darkness and attack them with all the effortless grace she'd seen in the movies. Caution, however, warned her not expose herself unless necessary.
If they were EarthGov, they should've been able to locate her with fixing onto her RIG's signal. An ugly truth she repeatedly ignored in order to contact her husband. They'd never really gone over the protocol for which channels to use should an issue like this arise. If they were successful in escaping, preliminary colonies seemed split between Kostantiniyye, Nausicaa or somewhere outside of EarthGov space (which meant pirates and outlaws). The idea was that they would able to reach the shuttle before anyone a part of EarthGov could grab them.
The idea was that they would be together when this landed on their doorstep. Instead they were separated by miles and miles of civilian terrain more than likely overpopulated by those things now. Gabe was as capable as the next man with a gun, but she'd seen how quickly the creatures overpowered the most experienced soldier. The sounds of their agonized cries as she sat curled up in a corner of the P-Sec headquarters echoed through her head as a reminder.
The fear of not knowing where he was gnawed at her with more urgency than the risk of bringing danger down on either of their heads and so she raised her wrist to her lips and contacted his RIG. The transmission was open, on the other end she could hear the low thrum of hospital equipment and his shaky breathing. He was alive! Her heart swelled, the flashlight shone overhead again, the beam of light was weaker and farther away from her present position. What did they want? "Gabe, they've almost found me. They're looking for me!" She whispered.
"Lex, it's not safe to use this channel. Vic is tracking you with it," Though his voice betrayed no panic, the urgency nor the warning was missed. Silently, she cursed her impatience, knowing she exposed both of them to Bartlett again. "Who's tracking you, other soldiers?"
"No, it's the men in white! They're, I dunno, they're different," It was incredibly vague information, the personification of all she really knew about the strangers that danced far too close to her hiding places to be mere coincidence. At this point it wouldn't be a stretch of the imagination to believe they were simply playing with her, waiting for her spring out into the open like a mouse.
"Thanks for call, Lex. I'll be there soon," The edge in Bartlett's voice startled her. He was listening the entire time?!
"You'll be fucking dead! …Hold on honey, I'm almost there."
The exchange terrified her in more ways than one. The collected certainty of Bartlett versus Gabe's explosive response showed just who had control over the situation and it wasn't the latter party. On top of almost giving her position away to the returning strangers, Gabe's temperament was suddenly the very opposite of reassuring. The doubt she felt growing in the back of her mind bloomed. He was angry and when he was angry, Gabe did not operate as efficiently as he'd like to think. Pressing herself further into the corner she could nothing except smother shallow breaths and hope no one got to her before Gabe.
2. Run and Hide
"Lex," The whisper was short and high. In the midst of panic, she moved too quickly. Her arm bumped the curtain next to her, the flashlight in front of it. Her pupils dilated in response to the amount of light that flooded her vision, she gasped, throwing her arm up to protect her eyes from the sting of the light. The curtain was thrown back, she ducked underneath the hospital bed, her arms collided with the ground with a resounding slap and she tried to crawl away from the man who pulled frantically on her pants leg.
The air in her lungs were caught in her throat, she could neither speak nor scream. Her fingers clawed at anything in front of her, knocking the IV stand down. With a yank the man dragged her back across the bed, eliciting a scream loud enough to attract more than unwanted company. "Let go of me!" She cried, legs kicking.
"Calm down, Lex, you realize how much trouble Gabe gave me trying to locate you?" Bartlett's long face, cloaked in shadows, sported a look that could kill. Pulling her leg back she thrust her foot forward, kicking him square in the left side of his face. He cried out as he fell back, Lexine rolled away from the bed and scrambled to her feet, flats slipping on the blood smeared across the floor.
Bartlett recovered, reaching over he grabbed her by the scruff of her hoodie and hauled her back. Lexine fell back with the momentum of her body and swung the weight of to the right. Her elbow collided with his jaw, knocking him off balance again, but only just. She wasted no time positioning herself for another attack. Lexine bolted and ran through asylum as fast as her legs could carry her.
"Lexine!" Her name was a curse on Bartlett's lips. The thunderous footfalls behind her propelled Lexine to move faster. She didn't care if she ran two the men in white, she didn't care if she ran into those creatures. If she could get away from the madman with the gun, get out of this hospital, her chances would be better than in a corner.
Bartlett seemed to be hitting everything in his path, not caring to who heard it. The strength of her heartbeat was awful, the throb so strong she thought she would collapse from a lack of air her lungs were so slow to intake. As she reached the second interior of the asylum, Lexine ran blindly ahead, ignoring the devastation and bodies pinned in the corners of the padded rooms.
Her foot slipped out from under her sending her crashing to the ground. Of all the times! She pulled herself forward, using her hands to push herself up far enough to get her legs out from under her. "C'mere!" Bartlett's arm came out from nowhere, closing the gap between it and her neck. His forearm pressed hard against her windpipe, he hoisted her off the ground in a chokehold, yet moved not forward, but backward. "No! Stop!" She yelled, grabbing his arm. "Get your hands off me!"
"Lexine!" Her heart leapt with a mixture of elation and fear. She looked up. Gabe was standing on the reinforced glass above the room, the orange monocle of his helmet glowing in the dark surrounding him.
"Gabe!"
3. Captured
Bartlett had been afraid of them, demanded to know why they were following him. His answer was given indirectly, throwing the obedient soldier off his guard long enough to incapacitate him with a strange device on their finger. Terrified by what could have been her mortality's end, she crawled up into a corner on a bed, watching the hands off approach to torture as Bartlett crumpled to the ground, his RIG status falling into the red.
They snatched her from the bed, ignoring her pleads to be left alone. The way they spoke of them confused her. 'His purpose is done', 'servants', 'key subjects'; she didn't understand any of it, but as far as the two men were concerned they'd gotten what they wanted. They strolled through the ruined hospital wing dragging her between them, unconcerned with the dangers that lay ahead of them.
The creatures weren't thoughtless as to leave easy prey unattended. They crawled out from behind whatever object hid them from the naked eye, crashed through the ceiling from the vents, yet the strangers remained unbothered by their gangly forms, even when forced to make for the exit a little faster they would like. They would lurch toward them with the intention to turn them inside out only to stumble back, bodies heaving, folding in on itself from pain she never believed they experienced.
Escaping either enemy was not easy as slipping from the clumsy bear grip of Bartlett. They applied enough pressure to her wrist that she couldn't move them, going limp left them exposed to the creatures. They yanked her hard enough to gain control of her upper arm and continued their brisk walk, even in the face of the husband's apparent death.
"Please, let me go, I never did… I never did anything to you people," She didn't know how much more she could take; without any sense of control over her situation, she could do anything except watch Gabe fall out of her sight as he was throttled to death by the tongue some gangly thing that as though he'd been eaten down to the bone, his tattered nurse's attire revealing his former occupation.
The wild yaps and low hisses in the cargo hold, ruined and steeped in signs of a lost struggle, sent a chill down her spine. The strangers continued onward, unconcerned with the shadows slipping behind the crates to observe them better. The entrance to the shuttle bay opened, one dragged her inside while the other shorted out the power cell next to the entrance. Lexine spied what could have been their ship; an EarthGov gunship bearing no recognizable insignias of any kind. "What you did to us is off little importance to us, Lexine Weller," The man holding her said. "What matters is what you could have provided us."
"And now?" She snapped, baffled by the absurdity of his comment. "We never said a word to anyone, not a thing! Why couldn't you people just leave us alone!?"
The stranger made a move to response only to have his partner raised a hand for silence. "There's no point. Come, we must prepare the stasis cham-ugh!" An involuntary scream escaped Lexine at the sight of a spear-like object sticking from the center of his chest. Blood streamed and gushed out from the entry wound in an almost comical feat of indecision. The culprit, one of the flying creatures, crawled out from behind him.
Straddling his upper body it punctured his head and began to convulse violently, acidic fluids of its system filtering up through its thin skin. The only surviving stranger reached for the weapon at his side; automatically, she stamped on his food and grabbed the handle of the Divet at the same time he did. They were locked in a brief battle of wills until another creature made its presence known with a second ambush. Lexine stumbled, the handle of the gun pressing into her skin the harder she gripped it.
Falling back she recovered just quickly and made a dash for the open entrance. The shuttle bay doors were barely open behind her when she heard Gabe's voice again; she turned, the weight of her body throwing her forward from imbalance. "Lexine! Run!" He was only repeating what she already knew to do, but, God, he was alive! The ship's doors closed automatically, she grabbed the bar above her and threw herself into the pilot's seat.
None of the controls were familiar to her, she who was only familiar with survey craft interfaces. She sat in the pilot's seat, listening to the chaos muffled by the thick steel walls. The struggle was brief. What felt like a lifetime to the beat of her throbbing heart, was over in mere minutes – the silence crept around her ears like padding drowning out the terrors. A hand firm on her stomach, she let herself breathe.
4. Soldiers who don't have a Grave Post
She had no idea where this gunship was taking her, she didn't care. If it were to suddenly lose power, Lexine wasn't sure if she could bother herself to hail for help, let alone find out if she could do anything to prevent it.
Why should she? After all, everything she's ever cared about has been torn from her grasp, the only natural conclusion would be follow them to the coveted place beyond the veil. Sitting in the co-pilots seat, Lexine stared into the static of the empty transmission screen, the energy sapped out of her.
She couldn't see him through the view port of the gunship and couldn't bring herself to look upon the face of their tormentors as he fought against them, but she counted on his survival. His suit would protect him from the vacuum, but as she watched the bulkhead seals snap out of place another struggle occurred and her first though was that it was another monster.
Then she heard, "Just… following… orders," Bartlett, in the face of his own death, still wanted to stop them from escaping. She heard the explosion and Gabe's scream, the element of a human enemy returned to the forefront of her mind. The structure of the ship rattled violently then all was silent. Lexine hailed Gabe repeatedly, each "video feed corrupted" she received; every ignored message compounded the stress that built itself around the cavity of her ribcage. Minutes passed in absolute agony, the fear that he might be dead worming its way into her mind.
The reality was much worse; Gabe survived, yet his only commendation for it was dying; he'd suffered some kind of injury from the grenade, one bad enough that he believed he wouldn't make it. Too afraid to move from the pilot's seat, she could do nothing but deny the truth in front of her- even as the creatures swarmed the bay, cut down by his efforts to release the final lockdown on the doors, Lexine refused to believe it.
The gunship launched the moment the vacuum robbed the room of oxygen, every sensory receptor in her body went into a panic at the realization of what was happening in. "Goodbye, Lex. I love you," The words, so often spoken in terms of endearment, were now a final farewell. No matter how loudly she screamed his name, he wouldn't move from the prone position on the floor the hospital.
He was gone, dead because of her. Gabe was hardly the first, but she hoped he would be the last. She was robbed of the opportunity to grow up with her mother, poisoned and bedridden by the ambitions of her profession. Robbed of her father, never to receive any kind closure and the same could be said of Sam on some level.
The likes of people like Howell, McNeill and Gabe, the both of them gave her some kind of solid ground to work on; indirectly or outright, through their actions, thoughts and promises, Lexine saw a light she could grab onto and never let go. None of them deserved the end they received and she could only wonder to whoever lay in the void of the unknown what made her a walking plague to the people she loved?
She knew what Gabe what would have told her, what he had told her. "Don't flatter yourself, sweetheart." A stream of tears ran down her cheeks, she had not the heart to wipe them away. Gabe never believed in the idea that an invisible entity, good or bad, was out to get any particular person. It was too easy to form some type of misinformed self-importance about one's own existence, insignificant in the grander scheme of a trillion life forms. Maybe he was right, maybe it was conceited to think she had something to do with their demise, but what other conclusion was there?
Those men and Bartlett thought her life important enough to terminate and somehow he fit into that equation as well. "You really want to blame anyone for your troubles, blame EarthGov," His voice rang in her head. Whatever hand they had in the destruction of their home, it inevitably fell on their shoulders what happened to everyone aboard that station. The simple minds of the individuals who thought themselves strong enough to mask the truth, like her, would be repeatedly revisited by incidents like this if their luck was a rotten as hers.
"Computer, locate RIG 681392, please," She whispered.
"RIG classification error, unknown serial number," Was the response she received moments later. The pain in her chest swelled tenfold, mingling with her confusion. Leaning back against the chair, Lexine tried to figure out what was going on. Maybe it was simply a figment of her imagination; she never heard his RIG flatline. RIGs, however advanced, did suffer from time delays; maybe he flatlined as soon as the ship shocked out of the system or later? Either way, a RIG was never classified as an unknown, even when the wearer was declared deceased.
Sparing a hand to rub the irritation from her eyes, Lexine used the other to access the navigation unit. A holographic schematic of the ship appeared followed by a spherical projection of a planet she'd never seen before; she sucked in her breath at the particular system it was in.
New Jerusalem was located in the Cygnus system, formerly the home of Aegis VII. Moreover it was massive city turned transport hub. Was this where those men were planning on taking her? The ship launched on automatic in her frenzied attempt to reopen the hatch and get to her husband when the bulkhead doors opened. That lack of knowledge saved her life in the end, now she was being taken someplace she'd never been nor wanted to go.
As her the static in her mind began settle and she allowed herself to think, Lexine remembered the baby. They were going to build a life together with him or her in the middle of, a testament of their future. Now it was only her and the baby. The best she could do was remember what Gabe taught her and keep moving forward. Wiping her face, she continued to try and familiarize herself with the military interface of the ship. "Computer, do you have the time?"
"The time is exactly 23:00 hours, eleven o'clock in the PM," The disembodied voice answered.
"Please let me know when we've arrived at New Jerusalem," Lexine responded.