AilAid (VayneLine) Read online

  “Living in the wrong living quarters,” Dix said simply. Bray looked away, which I thought was an odd movement. Did he know something more than us? I suppose it didn’t matter, since there wasn’t any point now. “Before outright collapse of the colony, of the first 500 killed, 94% came from the second living quarters.”

  No one said anything for a while, thinking about what it meant.

  Bray broke the silence. “No one thought to think critically about what being Marked might have meant. With as fast as everyone died, it was excusable. But since we are bunkered in, I’ve had some time to investigate.” He yanked a hair out. “White…all the way to the follicle. It’s not that the air or something is bleaching it. They are changed white. Something in my body’s chemistry has been altered.”

  “So something on the planet is changing us?” I suggested. “But why only some people? We’ve all lived here for the same amount of time.”

  “The only difference is what people do, or where they live,” Dixes pointed out.

  “Exactly.” Bray was going to continue, but a metal pot hit the ground in the next room over. The loud metal clanged as it slowly rolled across the floor, tearing me up on the inside. The sound came from within our small three room bunker.

  “They’re inside.” Dix’s voice had dropped her usual happier tone. She had swung from her sitting position to a crouching one, holding her rifle in front of her.

  “My pistol…” I began, almost pleading.

  “On the table,” Bray replied as he quickly knelt into a crouch, pulling his Plaz-Shot out in front of him from his back holster. He stepped forward, grabbing my pistol and tossing it backwards. It slid a bit and I grabbed it, standing next to Bray and Dixes as we peered out the door.

  “Plan?” I asked.

  “We’re pretty sealed. They had to have found a weak spot. We have to strike fast unless we want to get overran.”

  Dix stepped in front of us. “Let’s go. Sounds like the kitchen. Probably the vent.”

  I was not a fighter, and at the moment I was very glad she was as she led the two of us forward. Gratefully the lights were still on, but the cold metal was not inviting. The dull gray metal took a last-moment-alive feeling of the all-consuming reality. Every detail was so real, so vital.

  Another pot fell down, and its crash shook my nerves with each bounce it took. I just wanted the sound to stop so I could actually hear if anything was there.

  Dix swung wide, bringing in the room’s line of sight with her rifle. She instantly unleashed a torrent of case-less rounds magnetically propelled into the room. The loud sounds made me cringe, but the hyper-reality feel of the whole situation pressed me on. Suddenly two black forms leapt out of the room towards her.

  One of them was hit with a few of the rounds and spun to the ground. Dix leaned to the side as it crashed behind her. I heard Bray pull the trigger on the Plaz-Shot, but I was more concerned with what was in front of me: the wounded alien staggering towards me.

  Despite seeing them before, the single most disturbing thing about it was how humanoid it was. This one looked like a young woman, her eyes were vacant and pupil-less and her face scarred with black lines of tribal tattoos. I almost could see perhaps part of a jaw bone from the distorted flesh in its face. Out of its back was a type of demon wings that looked partially formed. Two metal poles of sorts came out behind it, but were not physically connected to its body despite moving with it; from this were damaged crystal-like diamonds that descend partly downwards. It looked like a broken, dark angel. Though they all looked slightly different, this one did not have either of its hands and in their place were large boney claws. Either one of the claws were capable of killing me instantly. The speed and deceptive power was evidenced by the stack of bodies the colony now contained.

  I gritted my teeth, pulling the flechette thrower up and holding down the trigger. The small rotating barrel was nearly-instantaneously spun up as it rapidly loaded the rounds into the spinning chambers. Each round was shaped like an arrow that was eletro-magnetically inducted out of the pistol at hyper velocities. The arrow flew straight, rapidly cutting through any armor as easily as it cut straight through bodies. Dix had told me the rounds were shaped to leave ‘cavitation wakes’ within the body that did extra pressure wave damage.

  The soft hum on the flechette thrower belied the sonic rounds it was throwing out that were much louder. In a mere fraction after I had pulled the trigger the alien was dismembered in front of me. One of the deadly arms flew upwards, detached by the arrows; only a liquid-y trail of bright blue indicated which way it had flown. Small pieces of the creature fell around it from the dismemberment it sustained. Its body was now only a heap of the terror it had been before me.

  “A vent! Get something to block it.” Dix held her rifle over the hole, shooting a few bursts into it. Bray waved me over as we pushed a large food storage container over the hole. We stood there, ready for… I don’t know, something to come jumping out I guess. It barely shifted as something pressed against it, and it was obvious they could not get enough leverage to push it anywhere.

  “What is that, two or three for you now, Ria?” Dix sighed and laughed, turning to me while smiling with a deep sense of relief that we got through that easy enough.

  “The third,” I replied, answering how many of the aliens I had killed.

  “Still scary?”

  “Always. Are you still scared?” I asked her.

  “I’d be lying if I wasn’t.”

  We had gathered around the body. There never was blood, just the corporeal remains of this shattered being. I kicked at the crystal wings, and there was a shattering as a large diamond fell off. It hit the ground and disintegrated into a glittery energy and rapidly disappeared.

  “Hard to think that wasn’t one of us…” Bray was poking its empty feminine fact with his weapon.

  I kicked another one of the crystals off its wing, shattering as it fizzled quickly in the air. “So strange,” I said rhetorically as we all stepped away lest it somehow infect us.

  “There is something you two need to know.” The two of us looked at Bray, whom had spoken. I did not like the way this was beginning.

  He took a deep breath and began, “I didn’t tell anyone until now, not even you, Dix. But there is one thing that happened that fits everything perfectly. The ‘Marking’, the deaths...” He stopped for a few moments. Bray would become quite serious much more frequently, which was alarming given his usual easy going attitude in the past. The change was another piece of evidence in how serious it truly was that we were the last ones left. “In the last tunnel we dug, we found something.” Was he telling us this because that last fight reminded him any moment could be our last?

  The situation had a dire feeling to it. His voice was cold, and scared of what he was saying. “We were following a rich vein, but there was always something strange with the sound waves. It appeared as if it was a dense, yet hollow area. With the last blast we uncovered a cavern. What was strange though…was a blue vapor that was released, and is still being released.”

  “Vapor?” Dix asked him.

  “I was not on the crew that opened it. But when I was there two shifts later, there was still the vapor leaking out.”

  “Was it poisonous?” I asked. What did this have to do with what was going on now?

  “That’s just it,” he answered as he turned his head downwards. “I say ‘vapor’ but it almost wasn’t there. You could try moving it, we even had vent fans, but the flow of the substance wasn’t affected. I put my hand into it, and it was warm, but that was the only sensation. It appeared to be flowing straight through my hand. You could sooner change a beam of light’s path by blowing on it than whatever that flow was.”

  “Strange,” Dix said, holding her chin with one hand as she considered what he was saying.

  “The Marked?” he began. “They were first crew of the miners.”

  “What!?”

  “Whoa…” The revelation
was powerful. My thoughts raced at what it might mean. It seemed to make a lot of sense, that they were exposed to whatever that substance was. “But…” My mind seized upon a fact, trying to prove that the theory was wrong. “If it was just the miners, it would have been obvious fairly quickly. The first wave of those Marked were way more than just the miners.”

  “And your hair did not change until recently,” Dix added.

  “Easy.” He lifted his hand to wave away the issues. “First of all, I think it has to do with both exposure, and the overall health of the person. I am extremely healthy, and even with direct exposure, it took a while to manifest. Who was the first? Brown, and he was hardly a fit specimen.” He lifted his arm and did a bicep flex, “In contrast I’d say I am a decent specimen.” It made me laugh a little which helped the mood.

  “Maybe,” I said, “but it still would have only been the miners.”

  “No,” he said darkly. “Tunnel-3 goes directly under the second set of living quarters.”

  “Oh man…” Dix managed to state.

  “And you said this stuff passes through walls.” Bray nodded at my comment.

  I was shocked. It certainly made sense. There had been rumors of hearing mining activity under the living quarters, but no one knew for certain. According to regulations they were supposed to be mining away from the colony because of the potential danger from sonic oscillations and collapses.

  It was always a bit of a secret regarding the tunnels, even something as simple as what they were mining for. But why would Bray lie? Then suddenly it made a lot of sense: the initial impact of whatever was in the tunnel would be spread across all of the population living in that set of living quarters.

  “That sure changes my perception of things,” Dix said.

  “Unfortunately, you do not know the half of it. But I will tell you later. I’m not sure I really want to speak about it just yet. It’s…pretty messed up.”

  ***

  My consciousness spun around slowly, accompanied by a vague sensation of floating through the air and an encompassing light. I would almost describe a cloud dissolving, but there was never a direct cloud despite the fact something did indeed resolve into a clearer picture. Most of the colors were browns, reds and oranges of explosions.

  What I was seeing gradually became sharp, jagged angles punctuated with a dry color throughout a majority of the scene. It appeared to be a city, maybe perhaps once pristine, now littered with both trash and the destruction of its own remains. It appeared to be a dry planet, or at least this city was, as there was very little greenery anywhere. A protonic missile (Wait…protonic? I’ve never even heard of that word. How did I know that was its name?) tore through part of a nearby hill, dissembling it into its component elements.

  What was once a defensible position now no longer existed as a group of men charged forward from concealment through the dust-matter of the hill to a new position, calculated missiles raining down from orbit around them. Their advanced helmets and armor covered their faces, but I knew whom I was watching before he even lifted his faceplate up.

  As if on (my?) cue, his black plate slid up, revealing a face with coldly-intelligent eyes. It was the boy I had watched earlier, now a man. His jaw was much stronger, and his look was undeniably masculine, even the scar near his chin added to the overall countenance. His face had perhaps an unjustified look of hostility that scared many away, though he was rather peaceful even if he didn’t look it.

  It appeared he was in a war, or at least a battle. He did not want to be there, (though did anyone?) but not in a way normally prescribed to mortals. He did not speak his expression verbally, but it was still a message that was directed towards me and I understood. I felt his revulsion so poignantly.

  He was crying, though his physical face was dry and focused, that violence was so often the choice men rushed towards. It was not that he was a coward, far from it; rather, it saddened him greatly that he was forced to defend himself – and kill – when it was so shallow of an answer. He told me he hated this destruction, this ending of life, and I understood that message.

  His mouth was moving, and his hands were pointing, but I could not understand him in this form of communication. It seemed crude, slow, and non-branched. (Non-branched? What did that mean? Yet it seemed like a very vital quality communication should have to it.)

  I did not know if I could even hear him. It was not that I was unable to ‘hear’ as I was quite capable of hearing many things. Though thinking about it, I was not hearing anything I should have. I did not hear fire from the weapons, screaming from those dying, nothing from the explosions around the city. Yet…yet it was unmistakable that I heard voices, and threads, if I can call them that, of possibilities of outcomes.

  As I watched what was occurring, my confusion made it difficult to understand what he was saying. But yet I so easily and readily understood things no one else would know. It seemed completely logical that I had known a protonic missile had been misguided in its target location, and that out of the hundred falling around the city which one it was that held the miscalculation. Yet it made no sense to me that he communicated with a small vibrating organ in his throat that produced waves in the air medium.

  The man strove forward, crouching next to a wall, waiting for the next wave of defenses to be clear. The rest of his squad crashed around the sparse cover, waiting to move out. The next building over was reduced to particles, and perhaps a bit of his waning hope in his race was likewise annihilated. He stood up to run further into the city and I did…something. It was again unclear how exactly my action was taken, because only the result was obvious.

  He had stood up to run, turning rapidly to sprint around the corner right as a piece of a ruined building caught just perfectly in an unarmored section of his upper body. His fast motion had in turn made his crash a hard one that sent him to the floor. To his squad, it looked like a clumsy mistake, misstep, or being unaware of a small detail. He hit the floor, holding his shoulder from where the metal had cut him.

  The next soldier knelt down to inspect what had happened, but he pushed him away and came up to a kneeling position. They were about to move out when a large shockwave hit them, and only the thick wall that had just fallen protected them from instantly dying, as the missile hit far too close. The blast knocked them down, but they were alive.

  His thread had been preserved.

  As in life, I was sure I had heard him say, thanking me.

  As in death, I responded.

  Always.

  ***

  “Are you certain that no one sent out a distress call?” Bray asked me. Asking me the same question was not going to change its answer.

  I shook my head, sadly completely certain. “Yeah, I know for a few reasons. One is how fast everything fell apart.” Literally within one dinner to the next, over half the colony had been killed. Of course the vast killing did not begin right away. There was plenty of time for panic and rumors of being Marked to have taken root among the populace.

  In an isolated and small group like this any death shot around like wildfire. Escape was not an option, and to some extent death was not completely abnormal; but when the rumors began of monsters or people’s hair turned white before that got killed, that was the kind of thing that tanked moral. Operations were suspended pretty soon after, but really at that point it didn’t matter with how fast the rest would become ‘Marked’ and then killed.

  I thought it about, and it had only been eight…no nine dinners since this all started. Time didn’t exist here, with no actual solar penetration down to the surface, and along with the crew schedules, the usage of meals was used to measure time. But for how much had happened, it seemed like a lifetime.

  I continued onwards, “No one in Comms thought to send anything out. Probably would have seemed stupid; it was only a few deaths before everything completely fell apart. Secondly, I had actually thought about at least sending a message about the deaths, and checked the logs. No one m
entioned anything.”

  “Why didn’t you send something then?” Dix asked, perhaps a bit accusatory.

  With a touch of defensiveness, “I would’ve had to have encoded the message for one thing. All messages outgoing had to be approved by Raislaw.” Bray seemed a bit agitated at the mention of the colony’s leader. “Honestly she seemed more than a bit interested in keeping what was going on a secret.”

  “Ha, wonder if she felt that way as she was dying,” Dix commented dryly as she laughed. Dix had a few diatribes against Raislaw she had told us more than once, both when she was alive, and even after she died. Most were about how she wouldn’t equip the guards with enough weapons.

  “Anyway, I planned on it, even if I knew Raislaw wouldn’t approve. It’d be easy to hide a thread or two in there that a good Comm Officer would pick up. But my next shift was…”

  “The emergence,” Bray simply stated.

  I nodded grimly.

  “Well, do I even need to say what needs to be done then?” Dix asked.

  “Unfortunately, not.”

  “The only question I have,” I started, “is how are we going to open a barricade, and ensure it hasn’t been compromised by the time we get back?”

  Dix looked straight at me. “We can’t. We can only hope. We will definitely have to run a thorough search when we get back.”

  It was obvious that this entire plan to get to the Comm room and send out a distress beacon relied on a lot of hope. But there was really nothing we could do otherwise. Our supplies might last us a bit longer, if we were not killed first. But the next ship coming would only be a robotic supply ship, and we couldn’t make it that long. Even if we could last until the supply ship, it was an unmanned drone, no life support systems to bring us out of here. Essentially, it was try and get a distress call out, hope it works, and maybe die anyway. Or do nothing and definitely die.

  “Anyway, you okay with that armor? Any trouble?” she asked me as I was slipping some advanced battle armor over my head. “Doesn’t look like it. Were you a solider before this?” Her voice had a bit of suspicion in it.