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Fifteen minutes had passed. They stood in a small storage closet, trying to catch their breath. Tashon leaned forward, hands on his knees. He’d been dry heaving. Johann stood tall with the back of his head resting on the wall, eyes closed. Neither one had spoken since they found their hiding spot.
Tashon spit and sat on a crate. He pulled the knife out and twisted it in his hands. A thin line of blood had dried on it. He didn’t want to keep going. Didn’t want to hurt anyone else. But if he didn’t, what would happen to everyone else? If he didn’t hurt those who were trying to hurt others, even more people would die. He wondered if that justified the killing. The murdering. Something told him that it must. Yet that didn’t ease the pit in his stomach. It didn’t calm his mind. He didn’t want to move forward. Didn’t want to live. But he didn’t want to die. He was stuck, floating through a fog of purgatory. A scream exploded from him and he slammed a fist on the wall. Johann opened his eyes and turned to him.
“You can stay here if you want.” Johann sat down next to him. “I bet I could take these psychos alone.”
Tashon rubbed his eyes. He wasn’t in the mood for banter.
“No. I’ll come,” Tashon said. “Besides, we can’t be the only two pushing back against them.”
“Sure as hell hope not.”
“Yeah,” Tashon said and stood up. “Let’s hope your hope is enough for the both of us.”
He hit a button and the door slid open. They walked out. Down the hall they went, side by side. Johann holding his gun at the ready. Tashon with a knife in each hand, arms at his sides. They moved at a quick, steady pace. Shots rang out in another corridor, the sound echoing toward them. Red lights flashed. An alarm blared. They stopped at a three-way split.
“Which way?”
“If they’re shooting, they’re shooting at someone,” Johann said. “That’s good for us.”
More shots rang out, echoes bouncing from the corridor to their left.
“What the hell? Left it is.”
Johann broke into a sprint. Tashon paused to take a deep breath, raising his knives. He ran after the old man. As they got closer, the shooting stopped. A few seconds of silence, followed by screaming. They turned a corner and entered a square room. There were two doors on opposite sides. Both were held open by what looked like dead bodies. On the left, a woman crouched on one knee, her gun pointed at a man across the room. He pointed his back at her. Both wore security uniforms. Neither one moved their gaze as Johann and Tashon came in.
“Johann. Chief Tashon,” the girl spoke calmly. “I’m glad to see you two alive.”
“Shut your mouth, traitor,” the man said.
Silence again. Tashon looked back and forth, his gaze shifting between the two. There was no way to tell which one was with the Extinctionists and which one wasn’t.
“Screw you.” The girl sneered. She raised her gun.
“Drop your weapons.” Johann stepped between them, blocking their line of fire. “Both of you.”
The man immediately crouched and placed his gun on the ground. The girl slowly adjusted her aim. Tashon shouted Johann’s name, but by the time he got it out Johann had already turned and fired at her. She dropped, her head coming to rest on the stomach of the body beneath her.
“Update, Officer,” Johann said to the man.
“Oh, um, just apprentice.”
“I used to be Chief of Security. You’re an officer now. Update?”
“Oh, uh, thank you, sir.” The man tried to gain his composure. “They haven’t made it into the main engine room yet. Three more doors to get through, and none of the tesseract engineers are giving in. They’ve executed two already.”
“Okay. We still have some time then.” Johann scratched his beard and pursed his lips. “How many do they have down there?”
“Eight fighting for them,” the officer said. “Three engineers held hostage. We should have five opposite the engine room. Or, we did ten minutes ago.”
“We should have many more,” Johann said.
“Spread thin, Mister Johann. Extinctionists are wreaking havoc across the ship. Starting fights. Tossing smoke bombs in the education district. Starting grease fires. Any kind of distraction they can. And they’ve disabled at least half the access doors. Same with the elevators.”
“Damn it.” Johann shook his gun at the ground. “Your name?”
“Modell.”
“Officer Modell. In your opinion, how did these Extinctionists bring so many to their cause? I just don’t get it. Makes no sense to me.”
Modell sucked in a breath with a whistle as he thought. He stretched his arms above his head. He was tall, and as he reached his hand to the ceiling, Tashon felt for a moment like a child standing at the feet of a stranger.
“We’ve been debating that ourselves, sir. The majority of those fighting for this insane cause is under the age of twenty-one.”
“Which means?”
“Most of them have little or no memory of the world before.”
“But we learned that in education,” Tashon pointed out.
“True,” Johann agreed. “But do you remember what it felt like to choke on the fog of pollution? Or wonder every time you took a sip of water whether it had been contaminated?”
Tashon shook his head slowly and gave a look that showed he understood. He didn’t experience life on Earth the way many had. In truth, he could not compare a life on the ship to a life on Earth.
“But why would that make them join a group set on destroying everything?”
Shots and screams echoed from another hallway. The three stopped and looked at each other. Each tightened the grip on his weapon.
“Knowing why isn’t going to stop them from taking the engine,” Tashon said. Though he wished it would. He wanted to be a part of stopping them, but he wasn’t keen on running off to commit more murders. However, the three took off with Johann and Modell side by side and Tashon right behind.
They took a right, a left, and another left. As they got closer to the main engine room, the walls became thicker to protect the engine. Which meant the hallways grew narrower. They were forced to run single file just as more screams rang out. Tashon stopped cold. Of all the screams he’d heard recently, that one sent his stomach into his throat. It was a wailing, stretched out scream that sounded like a man slowly being pulled apart. The three paused for a moment, then ran around the next corner. They had reached the tesseract.
The door to the main engine room stood ajar, the rectangle tesseract emitting a soft green glow. Two men in security uniforms stood in front of the open door. In front of them, three engineers knelt on the ground. One was holding his wrist. Blood leaked through the grasping fingers. Tashon looked to the ground and found a severed hand resting in a pool of blood.
One of the men had his helmet off, sweat-soaked hair sticking to the sides of his face. His eyes were dark. His mouth tight, open just enough for Tashon to glimpse his gleaming white teeth. He held a large knife in his hand. Blood dripped down its side. The other man stood to the side, hands clasped in front of him, unmoving. Neither seemed to notice the three that had entered the hall merely fifty feet away. They ducked behind a storage crate. Tashon’s heart pounded. His ears ached. He tried to quiet his breathing, but could not. He could either turn and run, or stay and face the monster he saw before him. Neither appealed to him. The man crouched and placed his fingers under the engineer’s chin. He gently lifted it up.
“Apprentice engineer.” His voice was surprisingly soothing. “Please. We need the launch codes.”
“Need them.” The engineer laughed and spat blood on the floor.
The man simply smiled and shook his head.
“The universe needs it. Have you not been hearing what we’ve been telling you?”
“All I hear,” the engineer said, “is a madman spouting bullshit to excuse his own insanity.”
“I am sorry to hear you say that, friend.”
The madman turned to the man behind him. “Gar,” he said with tears in his eyes. “Please proceed.”
Gar unclasped his hands and reached for the gun on his hip. Before he had it out of the holster, Johann had jumped into the room and fired one shot. It struck Gar in the left eye. The body wobbled for a moment, fell through the doorway, and landed with a thud next to the tesseract.
The dark-eyed man looked up with surprise in his eyes.
Johann and Modell walked toward him, guns centered on his skull. Tashon followed a few feet behind, his knuckles turning white as he gripped the blades. Something about the madman seemed familiar, but he couldn’t place it.
“Friends.” The man dropped his knife and raised his hands. “I see you’re upset. Let’s talk, okay?”
“We don’t have shit to talk about,” Modell said with a hiss.
“Oh, of course we do! Have you heard what we’re trying to do?”
“Kill us all,” Johann answered.
“No, no, no.” The man laughed. “You’ve got it all wrong. Okay, look. My name is Aleron. And you’re Johann, and that’s Tashon behind you. Who’s this other young man, pointing a gun at me?”
Johann glanced at Modell. He didn’t answer. His eyes didn’t even flinch.
“Aleron,” Tashon said. “Former Chief Pilot Aleron?”
“Ha! Chief Tashon, you recognize me.”
“B-barely,” Tashon stammered. “You used to be one of the ship’s most beloved chiefs. Now you’re, what, leading some crazed cult and killing innocents?”
Chief Pilot Aleron had been a revered pilot in the ship’s first decade. He led dozens of excavation missions. Each brought in more material than expected, allowing them to build the first three colony ships ahead of schedule. But, on his final mission, he crashed into a large asteroid and got thrown from his ship. His suit gave him thirty minutes of oxygen out in the open. He barely made it back alive. Tashon had thought the man still lived in the medical ward.
“Chief Tashon, you are incorrect on two points.” Aleron help up a finger. “First, I do not lead this so-called cult. No, I do not have the mind for such things. Second, we do not kill anybody because death is, in fact, an illusion. So, if no one can die, how, then, can one kill?”
“You’re batshit,” Modell stated.
“Ah.” Aleron smiled. “Insanity is also an illusion.”
“It’s easy to justify anything if everything is an illusion,” Johann said.
“Perhaps,” Aleron said. “Friends?”
Two more men in security uniforms emerged from inside the engine room. One held a gun in each hand. The other, knives.
In a sudden movement, the one flung his arm forward. A blade flew out of his hand. Modell ducked out of its path while firing a shot into the thrower’s forehead. The blade continued toward Tashon. He tried to move but wasn’t quite fast enough. The edge of the blade sliced the left side of his cheek as it flew past. He inhaled with a hiss and pressed the back of his hand to the wound.
Johann nodded, silently asking if Tashon was all right.
Tashon nodded back.
“Look.” Johann aimed his gun at Aleron. “I don’t know what your game plan is, but I will not let you take down this ship.”
“Well,” Aleron said. “Good thing I don’t plan on destroying it.”
“Or use it as a military vessel for your insane crusade.”
He looked down at the three engineers. The one with a missing hand had passed out on his side. Another stared blankly at the hand in the floor. The third moved his lips as if he were praying.
Modell took a step forward. “Fed up with this bull—”
Aleron’s bodyguard raised and fired his gun in one effortless motion. Modell’s head snapped back and he collapsed. With one glance, Tashon could see the officer was dead. Johann fired two quick shots to drop the bodyguard then turned his attention back to Aleron. He walked closer to the man until the gun was inches away from the sweat-soaked forehead. He pulled the trigger, but all that came from the gun was a soft click.
“Damn.” Johann punched the man across the face.
Tashon walked up and gently pushed Johann out of the way. “I want”—he coughed and wiped blood off his cheek—“to talk to him.”
He pushed Aleron into the wall with one hand and pressed a knife to his cheek with the other. His entire body trembled. This violence, this bloodshed, was all new to him. It felt like he’d been walking through bodies, knives and gunfire for years. But it had only been a couple of hours, maybe less. He stood there, unmoving, trying to focus on Aleron’s eyes. Wanting to shout at him, or stab him. Do something to him. But all he could do was picture his father’s lifeless body. See the blank stare that came over the other man when he stabbed him in the skull. He let his grip loosen, though Aleron stayed still, his eyes wide. Tashon turned his gaze for a moment and caught a glimpse of the tesseract engine and its soft green glow. He shook his head, and his mind began to clear.
“Wait, wait,” he said to Johann. “The engine.”
“What?”
“The engine. Smith. We could go help them.”
The engineer who had been praying looked up. “Is something wrong on Aethera?”
Johann sighed. “They crash landed. Haven’t had any updates. We kept it secret while we dealt with this onboard threat.”
Tashon shoved Aleron at Johann, who promptly knocked him out with the butt of his gun. Aleron slid peacefully to the ground with a slight grin on his face.
“Can you get us back there?” Tashon crouched to the engineer’s level. “Please.”
“You know,” the engineer said, “as a chief, you could just order me to.”
Tashon grasped his hand and looked at his name tag. “Thank you, Bodhi.”
Bodhi limped to the engine. He pressed a button and the top of it slid open. Inside was what looked like a chaotic array of wires, buttons and switches. With one hand, he dropped a small comm device into the center. It projected a two-dimensional hologram on top of the array, providing labels for every aspect of the engine. He quickly turned dials and flipped switches, stopping only once to confirm that he pressed the correct button. Tashon thought to question him, but decided he’d better not. With a flourish of his hands and a big grin, Bodhi flicked one last switch and picked up the comm device. A pre-recorded voice came over the ship’s speakers.
“Attention, five minutes until our jump to Fourth. Please proceed to the nearest safe jump location.” It continued to repeat the message.
Tashon let out a sigh and laughed. “Glad I didn’t just lie down in that storage closet to die,” he said.
Johann gave him a quizzical look, then walked over and hugged him. “Me too,” he whispered.
“Heathens!” Aleron screamed from outside the room.
Tashon turned to see the large knife leaving Aleron’s hand. It struck the engine, sending sparks and severing wires.
Tashon’s body tensed and his mind swirled. The one chance he saw to save Smith and his family, gone with the single throw of the knife. He looked at Aleron lying on the ground, coughing and smiling. With no regard to the guilt he’d felt minutes before, Tashon jumped on Aleron and raised his knife above his head. The two stared at each other. One with eyes full of conceited victory. The other with eyes blinded by rage. What would it matter, really, if he killed just one more person? Just drive the knife down one more time, let Aleron float off into whatever it was that came next. Tashon still did not move. Aleron had caused the death of countless civilians on the ship. Destroyed the only chance they had of going back for Smith. Possibly stranded them in a vessel that would become the floating grave of thousands. Still, Tashon’s arms stayed above his head.
Screaming, he dropped the knife and stood up, keeping his eyes away from Aleron. He paced back and forth. Thought Johann said something to him, but ignored it. Without warning, the ship shook violently. The engine whirred loudly. Tashon’s body lifted off the ground, then gravity grabbed hold and he fell on his back. With a smile, Tashon realized a damaged tesseract engine could still make the jump to the Fourth.
