The alien paused, and his face turned in an expression of disgust. He began to wipe his boots off on the floor, in an attempt to clean them of the blood. It was evident that this was incredibly distasteful to him.
“Let’s just get moving,” Morgenstern said to the other two, pulling at Ni. “The sooner we get things straightened out here, the sooner that bay can be seen to.”
So they continued on down the corridor. They did not get far though, before they came upon another sight just around a corner. There was a tangled mass of dead bodies in the doorway. Mostly humans, but there were a few other races in there as well. They had all bled out onto the floor, though one of the aliens had lived long enough to paint some intricate symbol on the wall in his own blood.
“Morgenstern-sir,” Ni said, looking over the corpses with some degree of horror. “What has occurred here?”
“I don’t know,” Morgenstern replied. He put a hand to his forehead and sighed. “This isn’t simple now. This isn’t our department, figuring out what happened.” He thought for a moment. This was a new development. There wasn’t really a protocol for dealing with something like this aboard a ship that was being serviced. What the team did next was all up to Morgenstern. “We’ll reestablish communications from the command deck,” he said at last. “We radio in and say what’s happened. Then we take the shuttle back outside until a patrol or something comes to look over the ship. Agreed?”
Brimley, his left eye slightly squinted and his mouth in an almost sneer, nodded. Ni paused for a moment, then nodded as well. Satisfied with this, Morgenstern began to lead them forward again, taking great care as they passed by the pile of bodies.
The signs that something awful had happened in this ship were only more apparent the closer they got to the command deck. Here and there piles of bodies were strewn about. Horror seemed to reek within the corridors, a lifeless horror that tugged at the minds of the three. But, they did their best to shut it out. All they had to do was fix the communication lines. Then they could leave this awful place.
The faint sound of whispers came to their ears. Morgenstern held up a hand as he tried to determine just where the noise might be coming from. There was a cabin door, slightly ajar, just a bit forward and to the right of their current position. The sound seemed to be coming from there.
Morgenstern slowly walked forward and looked into the room. There was a woman in there, sitting on the bed, reading out of an old book. She was whispering odd bits of nonsense and rocking back and forth erratically.
“Ma’am?” Morgenstern asked.
“And the earth was formless,” the woman said. “And the earth was formless. And the earth was formless.”
Morgenstern turned his head to one side. Something was obviously wrong with this woman. “Ma’am, can I...?”
“And the spirit of God moved over the deep!” the woman suddenly screamed, throwing aside the old book. Morgenstern now saw that she had a knife in her hand. “And God said, ‘Let there be light!’” The woman took the knife and sliced her own throat clean open. She fell forward, blood gurgling out of her as she began to bleed to death.
Morgenstern backed out of the room as quickly as he could and shut the door after him. He leaned against it for a moment to catch his breath. ‘I just saw someone die,’ he said to himself. ‘I just saw someone die.’
Ni came forward and put his hand on the captain’s shoulder. “Let’s go, Morgenstern-sir,” the Nurian said. “The sooner the communication lines are open, the sooner we may depart.”
“Seconded,” Brimley gruffly said. He glanced back down the corridor with a hard look on his face.
Morgenstern nodded and stood firm again. “Right then. Let’s go.”
The three of them continued onward. They did their best not to look at what was around them for fear of seeing something that they should not see. If some horrifying sight was to enter their minds now, it could render them unable to do their work. And if they wanted to leave this place, they could not allow that to happen.
At last, the party entered the command deck. Orange light from the outside spilled in through the large windows. The control panels were all blinking red, signifying the failure of many ship-wide systems. The bodies of the command crew were scattered about in much the same way that the bodies of the passengers had been elsewhere in the ship. One unfortunate soul had managed to scrawl one word on a window in his own blood. “Tekel.” It seemed to glare at the three as they began to search the room.
Brimley looked over the command deck with a practiced eye. Though not quite as educated as Morgenstern was, he had been around for a bit longer. He had experience with how the systems ran and how things were worked from this position. He flipped a few switches, cursed under his breath, then flipped a few more switches.
“Well, communications will be online shortly,” he said, a small smile crossing his face.
“What was the problem, Brimley-sir?” Ni asked.
“Someone up here shut it off,” Brimley said. He punched a few keys on one of the computers. The main screen of the Antigone began to display a record of actions that had been taken. Morgenstern could see that the communications had been shut off on a bridge-mandated order just immediately after the call for engine repair had been put out. Everything after that though was an increasingly gnarled mess of orders that made absolutely no sense.
Ni went over to another set of keypads and began to fiddle around. Projecting what he was doing onto the main screen, he accessed the security logs of the ship. After a moment or so, he paused.
“Morgenstern-sir and Brimley-sir, there is no audio here of the events surrounding the time those orders were given,” he said. “We may view video of what has transpired, but after a point audio recording was disabled by some external force.”
Morgenstern furrowed his brow. “Let’s see the video then,” he said. “Main corridors, the bridge, and the external stern view, looking back over the ship.”
Ni pressed a few more buttons and the appropriate screens began to play. Morgenstern took a deep breath. Here they would be able to see just what had happened to this doomed place.
The recordings were started a few minutes prior to the time that communications were cut off. For the most part, things aboard the Antigone seemed fairly normal. The passengers were moving about the corridors rather benignly, and the bridge crew was running things in an almost lazy fashion.
The audio was still good on these parts of the recordings. Most of it was just idle noise though; the chatter of the passengers or the idle monitoring of the bridge crew.
At one point though, the ship seemed to shudder. Morgenstern picked up on this, and paid close attention. Experience told him that this was probably when the engines started to shut off.
The bridge crew came to the same conclusion. They informed the captain, who immediately contacted Control and sent the message, that last known message from the Antigone. Almost immediately after that though, the bridge crew, and all of the passengers, seemed to enter this odd trance. It was at this point that all audio ceased. Morgenstern noted that the captain accidentally shut off all communications just as this happened.
But, that little detail was soon lost as the people aboard the Antigone began to slaughter each other. The three’s mouths drew agape as they watched the bridge crew and passengers mutilate and kill for no reason whatsoever. They used whatever was available, be it their own body parts or the body parts of others.
Ni slammed down on a button and the main screen went blank again. “Wait,” Brimley said.
“What more do you want to see?” Morgenstern asked. A bit of exasperation crept into his voice.
“Didn’t you see the dorsal camera?”
“That wasn’t exactly forefront on my mind, Brimley,” Morgenstern replied.
Brimley turned to Ni. “Bring the dorsal camera up again. Back at the beginning.”
The alien took a deep breath, then punched in a few more buttons on the keypad. The image from the exterior of the Antigone looking back to its engines came up. At first, all it showed was the clouds of the gas giant, nothing more.
But, as the three of them watched, something loomed behind the ship. It was some undefinable mass of muscle and tentacle, floating in the atmosphere. Its course took it right against the Antigone’s engines. They collided, producing the jolt that the three had seen earlier. The creature began to move away, but as it did it began to send out a call, one that began to increase in pitch. The audio recording failed before the sound got too incredibly high though, and the creature disappeared into the atmosphere.
“There’s the problem,” Brimley said, pointing a grubby finger at the screen. “That’s what happened.”
“What do you mean?” Ni asked, his hands still shaking.
“That creature did this,” Morgenstern said. “That call... you think that’s what happened, Brimley?”
The older man nodded, a grim look on his face. “They heard it, and went insane.”
“You mean, that thing’s cry of pain, it did this to these people?” Ni asked, moving his hand around the command deck.
Morgenstern nodded in a grave manner. “May God have mercy on their souls.”
“Their souls don’t matter,” Brimley said. “Not no more. But ours do. I suggest we have mercy on our own souls and get out of here.”
Ni nodded nervously. “Yes... I agree with Brimley-sir.”
Morgenstern nodded. There was no reason to stay aboard this ship. They would send out for a recovery team. Those boys would be better able to deal with this, hopefully. First things first though. They had to leave this ship.
“Let’s go,” the captain said as he made for the door. The other two were not far behind him.
They made their way through the corridors back to the loading bay in record time. Not once did they slow their pace. They had seen enough to know that to stop and smell the roses here would be damaging upon their psyche. All that was left to do was flee, flee this damned place for the safety of the shuttle.
When they got to the loading bay, they found the shuttle was mercifully untouched. They wasted no time in getting to it and sealing themselves within it. Morgenstern practically leapt to the controls and powered it up. He ignored the traditional protocols of logging actions taken aboard the ship and looking over the inventory of his team in favor of speeding up the take-off process.
Service Shuttle C-30X rose from the loading bay and left the Antigone. The pleasure liner’s bay doors opened, and the shuttle entered the atmosphere of the gas giant. Morgenstern kept it on a course away from the other ship. He wanted as much distance between himself and the horror as possible.
“Ouraul...” Ni whispered.
“What’s that?” Morgenstern asked, leaning back to hear the Nurian.
“It is nothing, an old legend of my race,” Ni said, looking down at the floor. “Legend tells of the Ouraul, a mighty creature that will fly through the sky one day. It will sing, and the world will end.”
Brimley huffed at this. “Those folks got their own private Ouraul then,” he said.
Morgenstern did not particularly feel like reprimanding Brimley for his comment. It seemed all too true.
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