Night of the Screams

The blaze burned before him. A column of flame, that contrastingly guided him to those who fled; guiding his path in the night. He skirted the edge of the camp and quickly found a boulder to hide behind.

A strange voice whispered from inside the tent; familiar, but foreign. Yet as soon as these observations of the voices whirred up, they blurred out; his mind contracted upon these wretched thoughts; the voices garbled them into undecipherable gibberish.

Another voice groaned? in response to the first; its voice garbled as well.

He detached the blaster from his back, gently lowered it to the rock. A shadow arose from inside the tent, as if on cue, gesticulating wildly. He moved faster, in hast of being found. His fingers flexed. His actuators rippled as he aimed the blaster.

The first shadow squealed, unknowingly trapped like the lowly rat it is. The second shadow yelled at the first, oblivious of the fate that awaited him.

With the final adjustment in place, he slammed in the extruded energy cartridge. He felt his voice box ripple and watched as the shadows whipped into panic. The blaster whirred into action. With a pull of the trigger, the bursts flew through the air.

The blasts ripped through the tent, shredding it to pieces. A few screams resounded, mostly drowned out by the roaring of his blaster. A light clanking to the left; their desperate attempt to arm blasters. Though this resistance was futile, he rotated his blaster in response to their threats, horizontally slicing across the tent surface. After a few more blasts, the voices fell silent under the blaring red beams. In mere moments, their fabric fortress had been vaporized, crushed before their eyes.

Forced by protocol, he let go of the trigger, raised his blaster, cooling it in the breeze, then approached the tent. A cloud of smoke hovered over what was left of it. His eyes locked in, focusing through the smoke. To the left, a body was splayed on top of a blaster. In the front, another lay crumpled, back arched. To the right- movement! He swiveled on his heels- BAM!

He careened from a blow to the head. A stock whipped back from his field of view. The other shadows leapt up as he stumbled back. His feet righted themselves beneath him as the shadow triad fled before him, abandoning their tent. His body pumped and whirred; the chase had ensued. Blaster in hand, he ran, hunting those rats that fled across the rocks.

They ducked and dived, out of and into the cover of boulders, following the rhythmic cycle of reloading and unloading. The colony drew nearer; haste was of the necessity; they could not escape.

His mouth twitched; his voice box echoed; his finger hovered over the trigger.

The trio foolishly jumped out from behind their cover. They scrambled towards the nearby blast doors, but to no avail. They have been tricked, and now they will die: the voices echoed within his mind. His bursts shred through the space between them. Hair burnt, blood flew, flesh sizzled, mouths screamed, as they writhed-ran in agony. It was a glorious sight – all but ruined by the actuality of the need to reload.

By the time his head rose back up, the blast doors had already slammed close.

Able to observe after the action, he now saw that the colony lay nestled amongst a rocky crag on the side of the valley. The blast door loomed foremost, a vanguard of pure irodinium which rested on the thick steel walls. Once again, the voices echoed in his mind, beckoning him forth. A quick movement and his blaster was slung. He walked towards the doors, in step with the spattered trail of blood.

With a thump on the door and walls, his computations confirmed it was completely impregnable. In a last ditch effort, he focused his lens, scanning the entire length of the colony’s facade. The voices sighed discontentedly, his prey had gotten too far; though at this point the thermoptics were of no significance anyway, even if weak points existed within the wall, there would be barely enough bursts left in his blaster to break through. But with potentially more ahead, that was out of the picture.

He gave up on scanning the wall, for there was no visible entrance for him. Nor was there any indication of an entrance elsewhere on the topographical scanner.

He traversed the cliffside and eventually found the grate of a ventilation shaft. A quick fling and the grate skittered across the rocks below. He stuck his head inside, folded his arms, then wormed his way down through the squeeze, dragging his blaster behind him. He wriggled his way through the ventilation system of the colony. Lights flickered and flashed beneath him, shining up through slots. The lights tickled and teased his mind, entranced the truth within; the voices resisted. Screams reverberated around him. Cyborgs ran beneath him. Humans fled before hims. With a push of his head, he bashed through a grate, falling from the ceiling.

A momentary daze, but with a shake and a bang to the head, it was refocused. Blaster in hand, he charged down the halls, joining his foray of bloodshed.

His mind twisted down the halls. Absorbing the countless passersby. His fingers tightened around a throat, crushing it; a bursting blood bubble. The walls oozed. The floors shook. Blasters shred. A squad squashed beneath his feet. Faces smashed against the wall; a lab coat soaked in blood.

The tiles whispered around him as he flew down them. Lasers burst around him. Ducked. Weaved. Dodged. Blasted. Countless people filled the hallway sporadically. Migrant colonists. All dead. Vanquished, instantaneously.

The three shadows ducked into a room. Emerged. Chased. One down, hysteric. Two down, clouds of blood. The third scrambled at his fingers, latched, crushing. Electric synergy roared resistance of voices. The first attacked; undead savior. The mission reaffirmed. Chased. Target limped. Back to the room. Monitors’ multiplicity. Resistance no more.

Two bodies crossed the rocky surface – a broken mind; a limp flesh bag. Into the vessel they went. Balded, sprayed, moleculized, injected; the searing pain ripped out. A blank slated mind frozen soothingly.

From the cargo bay to the courtroom, he drug his load. The wheels of his cart creaked from the weight. Countless worker bees filed around him, down the halls of The Governance. The reverberations of the never-ending footsteps around him conjoined with the rhythmic clank-whirring of the distant make-shift production lines – ever decreasing in production.

Slowly he went, dragging the cart behind him. Each passing cyborg remained unshifting in their pattern, except for a slight sidestep to make room for his passing. Blasters in arms, they remained unassisting as their feet pounded down the hall.

As he approached the courtroom, several similar loads came passing by him: carts covered in black cloth. Forced to the side, he watched as the procession moved along. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. And with that, they were gone; they had disappeared into the moving mill of machinery.

Finally, he entered the courtroom. It was a vast chamber that echoed with every movement, every shuffle of the feet, every shift of the weight. The white halls welcomed him, the quartzroom pillars circled the room. He stepped inside and the doors slammed shut behind him.

“Greetings C1.” A robed figure, center pedestaled, stared out at him from beneath the black drapery. His eyes; cold, glinting beneath the hood.

“Greetings . . . C1.” More of the similarly fashioned figures resonated, lined beside the main figure, evenly spaced on their own pedestals. A lone pedestal stood empty on the right. The eyes stared at him, now much like the main’s, yet different.

The council beckoned him forth. He dragged his cargo with him to the middle of the chamber. With a swish of his hand and a fwish of the sheet, he unveiled the load.

“What? Is this all???” the center figure jumped to his feet. Even through the perfect facial deconstruction the figure could see through it, for he already knew. “Praeposterus!”

“Praeposterus,” “Praeposterus,” “Praeposterus,” “Praeposterus.” The voices resounded around the central figure.

“C1, the instructions were clear, and you have failed. There is no third chance. Where are the other two? This one is unnecessary, and so are you – necessarily unnecessary.” The figure raised his arms from within the robes, pointed at him; cyborgs filed in from the hallway, latched him in their grip, stripped him of his blaster. “Take him away.”