The grogginess caught Harry by surprise. It almost took a few moments for him to register that he hadn’t passed out. Everything swirled around him, and it felt as if he was on a ship on the ocean, cascading between rolling waves. And then it passed. There was just enough time for him to become fully cognitive before the Odyssey lost all power. Everything. The moment the ship crossed the threshold of the Expanse, every system on the ship went into standby. Luckily, moments later, the emergency reserves kicked in, ensuring a continued stream of life support throughout the ship.
Darven and his crew had locked in a course using thrusters only and sent them on their way. Harry was still unsure as to the nature of this supposed demise, but already the added darkness seemed to envelop him. A cold sweat began to form on his brow as he looked around the bridge at his other officers, who unlike him, had been rendered unconscious.
Kelly came to first, and unsure of where she was, fell out of her chair and faceplanted the floor.
“Mother fucker!” she screamed, the noise seeming to echo throughout the ship.
As she struggled to her feet, Harry could see a thin trickle of blood coming down from just above her left eyebrow.
“Kelly, you okay?” he asked, his voice still hoarse.
She shot him a look of pure rage.
“Okay? You wanna know if I’m fucking okay Harry? What do you think?! Why don’t we try letting some mind reader control you like a fucking puppet and see how you like it!”
Several quick and sharp breaths followed her outburst, and she was struggling to maintain any form of calm or composure. Harry staggered over to her, and placed his hands on her shoulders to steady her.
“Come on Kelly, breathe. Take slower and deeper breaths, I need you focused, come on now.”
After a few minutes, Kelly managed to calm herself enough to talk, and nodded to Harry that she was okay. Around them, several others began to wake up, and after explaining to them where they were and the things that Darven had said, he attempted to come up with a plan.
“We need to restore main power, and crack whatever security measures they put in place for the engines. Our priority is getting out of this expanse as soon as possible.”
Commander Teale, now sporting a sling on her injured arm from a possessed Kelly’s earlier shooting, stepped forward.
“Admiral, what exactly is the expanse? Why would they send us here?”
Before Harry could answer, there was a bloodcurdling scream from somewhere beyond the bridge. Nobody dared move, too afraid of what they might find. The cries of agony increased and turned to gargling noises before being cut off abruptly. Back to silence.
“What the…” started Kelly.
“”I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure we’re gonna find out,” replied Harry. “And to answer your question Teale, I think we just became someone’s lunch.”
* * *
Kelly didn’t hear the dripping until it was almost in front of her. A steady drip, drip, drip was pattering onto the previously shiny and new marble floor. She aimed her disruptor rifle above, the beam of the torch attached illuminating the target. There was no question about it. The liquid was blood. And it was dripping through the light fixture above them, which now glowed the red of danger as opposed to its usual halo of white. Reluctantly, Kelly nodded to one of her security team, and he leaned up, unclipping the fitting. With only half the bolts removed, the sheer weight above buckled the rest of the fitting and the entire ceiling panel came crashing down from above, the security officer being knocked to the ground by the appearance of what used to be a human body.
Kelly wanted to scream, but she forced herself to keep it in. The mangled corpse was pushed aside by the security officer, and Kelly couldn’t tear her eyes away from the horror which lay in front of her. There was no face left to speak of. Four deep claw marks were scratched into the skull beneath, and similar marks tore through the chest of the victim. A large pool of blood began to collect around the body, and Kelly noticed one of its legs had been torn away, the tendons and muscles hanging limply from the severed thigh. Very quietly, she addressed her team.
“Grant and Sanderson, you two fan out towards engineering. Grayson and Hunt, you two head for Cargo Bay One. Teale, you and me will head for sickbay. Keep your wits about you. We don’t know what these things are, or where they’re hiding. And for the love of god… don’t let them touch you.”
Silent nods around the group, and the six team members split up heading for their various targets. Only two of the team would return to the bridge when the searches were done.
* * *
Harry’s team had remained on the bridge to establish if any of the internal sensors were working. They weren’t. The Darla had locked everything out before the power drain, so even if they did have full energy capacity, they still wouldn’t be able to access main computer systems. After trying and failing to send out a distress call, they had left the bridge and headed in the opposite direction to Kelly’s team, towards the crew quarters. With an original crew of a thousand, the quarters made up half the ship’s mass. Similarly to Kelly’s team, Harry split his into three search parties of two. He teamed up with tactical officer Perry, in the hopes he was as good with a handheld weapon as he was with the ship’s disruptor cannons.
“You doing alright back there Lieutenant?” Harry whispered under his breath.
“Yes Sir. Just another day at the office right?”
Harry chuckled to himself, a welcome relief given the circumstances. They turned the corner ahead of them and Harry let out a long sigh, lowering his weapon in frustration.
“Well, that’s a dead end then.”
In front of them was the only remaining damage from the initial Darla attack months earlier. A ten metre gap in the hull spanning the floor ahead prevented them from going any further. The emergency power had kept the forcefield in place, but it meant they had to find another way around.
Suddenly, a dark shadow shot behind Perry. The light breeze made him spin around, aiming his rifle into the darkness.
“What was that?” he said, his voice trembling.
“I didn’t see anything Lieutenant. Are you sure?”
Perry turned back to Harry.
“I felt something behind me Sir, like a… a shadow.”
Harry’s own heart rate was elevated so he knew how Perry was feeling. This was after all, his first deep space mission of any kind. The Odyssey had plucked him straight out of the academy. Tested off the charts second only to Commander Kelly Dresden. Harry had chosen him personally. Promoted him within six weeks, and stationed him at tactical.
“This constant darkness has us all on edge, son. But I’m still not picking up any lifeforms on my scanner. It’s just your mind playing tricks on you.”
Perry chuckled and shook his head.
“Forgive me Admiral Ransome, but I’ve seen this movie, and the black dude gets it first. If it’s all the same to you, I’d appreciate you checking it out with me.”
“Lieutenant Jayden Perry, are you asking me to hold your hand?”
The levity was welcomed and it broke a good degree of the tension, as Harry nodded and the two of them returned to the junction they had turned around moments earlier. Harry wanted to keep Perry distracted as long as possible, and himself if he was being honest. He decided to make small talk.
“So Jayden, what did your old man think of you making it onto the Odyssey?” he asked.
“He couldn’t be prouder, Sir. He wanted to come to your house and shake your hand personally. It was everything I could do to get him to stay home.”
Harry chuckled as he swept his torch light across what he thought was a figure in the darkness. It was in fact a discarded fire extinguisher.
“I served with your dad on Mars. He was a good soldier. Always first into the barracks of a morning, and last one out. I was real sorry about what happened to him.”
Perry nodded his head as he too aimed his flashlight at a moving shadow up ahead.
“He’s doing alright Sir. We had the house adapted, and now he rolls his ass around the place like a Formula E driver.”
Harry pictured the very image in his mind. Marcus Perry had always been a speed demon. He was planning to test the next iteration of the star drive once his tour of duty was completed. Unfortunately a rogue disruptor blast at maximum power across his spine put that dream beyond reach.
Whoosh.
Something flew behind Perry, this time much closer than it had been before. He span round to try and catch it, Harry turning with him.
Whoosh.
This time, behind Harry. And this time he felt it. The hairs on the nape of his neck shot towards the sky, and goosebumps covered his whole body.
“I guess it wasn’t your imagination, Jayden.”
“No Sir, it was not.”
From behind Perry, a scratching sound started echoing towards them. It got gradually louder as it came closer to them, and the sound equivalent to nails on a chalkboard almost shattered Ransome and Perry’s eardrums, such was the volume. And then it stopped, leaving the two of them staring into the darkness, their breathing the only audible sound.
Whoosh.
“AAAAAAAAAAARRRRRGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!”
In the blink of an eye, Jayden Perry was gone, his rifle clattered to the floor, and only a trail of blood as evidence he had ever been there in the first place. His cries only audible for a moment, but enough for Harry to have a rough direction to head in. The speed of the attack had, for a moment, failed to register in Harry’s mind. He had never even seen Perry move, never mind the creature which had taken him. But as he stalked around the next corner in the corridor, a thought occurred to him which until now, hadn’t.
On a ship of a thousand people, where was everybody else?