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in the void, they dwell
chapter ten

Written by Alex Hera

“To hell with it. Let’s find the keycard,” said Adair.

“What about that… thing?” asked Florian, concerned.

“Hasn’t killed us yet,” she replied.

The party took off down the only accessible hallway, the dim red hue of the emergency lights their only guidance as they moved through the sleek corridor. Bruno kept his eyes glued to the datapad, informing them of when to turn. Left. Right. Left. Left again. The deck was massive, and Florian began to worry that they’d become lost – or worse, sealed in by bulkheads, but the entity was nowhere to be seen. They soon came to the Cryochamber.

“It’s in there,” said Bruno.

Adair took a deep breath, and pushed the door open. It hissed, the warm air from the corridor mixing with the freezing atmosphere inside. There was ice along the walls, with a haze emanating from the far wall, where a number of cylindrical tubes in the walls held cryofuel.

“Containment is failing,” said Bruno. “Watch where you step. If any of it gets on you…”

“Freezer burn?” asked Florian.

Bruno nodded. In the corner of the room, a crew member was frozen solid, grasping at the door to a cryopod. He looked up at the tubes connected to the pod, running into the floor and through the rest of engineering.

“He was trying to save himself,” said Cassian.

“Waiting out this whole mess doesn’t seem like a bad plan,” said Florian.

“Seems like he ran out of time,” said Bruno. “These pipes run through the rest of the deck, probably to the core. In a few hours, this whole place might be frozen.”

He crouched down to the frozen corpse, spotting the keycard on a lanyard around his neck. He reached out and grasped it, but it refused to budge, frozen solid and stuck to its former owner.

“Just tug a little harder,” said Florian. The engineer rolled his eyes and pulled as hard as he could. The ice cracked and the corpse’s neck shattered. Its frozen head tumbled to the ground as Bruno looked on in surprise, holding the keycard in his hand.

“So much for respecting the dead,” said Florian.

“Let’s just get back to the core,” the engineer replied.

They made their way back, still tense, on edge awaiting the return of the boundless creature that was stalking them – but they once again passed through engineering without interruption. Bruno swiped the keycard and the door to the Engineering Core slid open. They stepped onto a balcony overlooking the main floor. A towering reactor stood in the center of a massive circular room, shaped like a dome that was multiple stories tall. Catwalks ran along the walls and stations with computers and diagnostic equipment were scattered around the Core. The reactor glowed a brilliant blue, reflecting off of the shiny metal walls.

“So this is what we restored power to earlier?” asked Adair.

“Yeah,” said Bruno, in awe. “I’ve never seen one of these up close. It’s a magnificent work of engineering.”

“Bruno, focus,” said Cassian, pointing to the floor below them.

A black monolith stood in front of the reactor, lit by bright white lights with half a dozen pieces of equipment pointing at it, taking scans and measuring energy levels. The wayfarers climbed the stairs from the balcony down to the main floor and approached the monolith with reverence. It was an iridescent black color, impossibly smooth around the sides with a jagged, rocky top. Bruno immediately took interest in what was carved on the monolith. Unintelligible runes and sigils covered a significant portion, as did crude drawings. They depicted hundreds of humanoid creatures, ones with four limbs and oblong heads, bowing in worship to a dozen massive, slender creatures… just like the alien they had seen outside. Above them, similar creatures, ones with wings, and another with many arms like a spider, floated amongst hundreds of dots – stars.

“Bruno, what the hell is this?” asked Cassian.

“This… is what Dyson was searching for. It must have been,” he said. He ran to a nearby console and turned it on, his eyes scanning across the screen with increasing fascination and urgency as text scrolled across it. “It’s so familiar. I feel like… I’ve seen this before.”

“How is that possible? What are you not telling us, Bruno?” Adair demanded.

“Nothing. It’s not possible, because I haven’t seen this. But just… there’s something about it,” he said, confused at his own reaction. “This terminal says it came from the planet below. 1843.03. They suspected there was life there once. Eight weeks ago, an expedition team found the monolith buried beneath the surface.”

“And then everyone started getting sick,” said Adair.

“More than that. They started reading… massive amounts of energy. Strange particles detected around Entropy IV. The monolith was… alive. It started affecting systems on the station long before the crew started dying,” said Bruno.

“Dyson only lost contact with the station six weeks ago,” said Florian.

“They knew. The bastards knew. I told you,” said Adair.

“You were right,” said Cassian.

“It doesn’t matter. How does this change anything?” asked Florian. “Does this tell us how to kill that thing?”

“It depicts them as Gods. Unkillable. Evershifting. I… I don’t know what we can do,” said Bruno. “If the monolith called it here, maybe by destroying it we can get rid of it?”

“Can we do that?” asked Adair.

Bruno looked around the Core, and then to the reactor itself. The blue glow glinted in his eyes, and the answer came to him.

“If we overload the reactor, the sheer power of that… it should vaporize everything in the station,” he said.

“Then that’s what we have to do,” said Adair.

“What about us?!” shouted Florian. “How do we get off? How do we free the ship?”

“We can set the self-destruct from the bridge,” said Cassian. “Adair, can we release whatever’s holding the ship in place from there?”

“If we can’t do it from the bridge, we can’t do it from anywhere. It’s worth a shot,” she said.

“So it’s a plan,” said Bruno.

“This is insane!” protested Florian.

“Do we have another choice?” asked Adair, aggressively.

The answer was no, of course. Before they could even argue any further, the walls went impossibly dark, no longer reflecting the blue glow of the reactor, as if the light around it was somehow being suppressed. Backlit by its glow, the alien creature descended from the ceiling, gliding slowly towards the floor. The wayfarers watched in horror.

“It wanted us to see this. It’s… toying with us,” said Florian, aghast.

“Bruno, find us an escape route, now!” demanded Adair. Bruno looked to his datapad and then over his shoulder. There was a large blast door a few yards behind them, underneath the balcony they had descended from. A massive emergency lever sat on the wall next to it.

“That door. It leads to… I don’t know,” he said, smacking the side of the datapad a few times. The screen was glitching, tearing and flickering on and off, the words on it switching to the same unintelligible runes from the monolith. “I can’t see. But it’s the only way out.”

“So we run for it,” said Cassian, keeping his eyes trained on the creature, still descending slowly. “Can you buy us time? It’ll be right on our heels, we might not make it.”

“The cryo fuel runs straight to the core and from this terminal, rupturing the line might slow it down. But I don’t know if I can activate it in time,” he said. “And if we’re caught in it the blast...”

“We only have a few seconds!” shouted Florian. “At least this thing has a flair for the dramatic!”

Art by Sage / HerbalSpecialTea