Chapter 12 - 17 Hours Inside

Time was running out.

A quick glance at his oxygen meter told Plav-tor-fel-mak that he had a little less than an hour of air left. His smaller body and reptilian heritage made him use less air than his Terran colleagues—former colleagues, he corrected himself. Even so, it would not be enough. They were working their way through the bow of the ship now, but the bridge—from what he had seen from the outside before they started their expedition—was still an hour away. The best he could hope for was seeing it in the distance before death and eternal darkness embraced him in their cold grip.

“What will you do when we get out of here?” Est-mar-kort asked, the lack of cheer in her voice betraying that the question was more for keeping morale up than actual curiosity.

Plav-tor-fel-mak would have preferred not to answer, to be left alone with the dark thoughts echoing through his mind.

“Probably go back to Kelar,” he replied, not wanting to go into detail about a make-believe future that would never come to pass. “I’ve had enough of deep space for a lifetime.”

“I hear you,” Est-mar-kort said. After a short pause, she continued. “I might resume my training for the priesthood when I get back,” she revealed.

“Priesthood?” Plav-tor-fel-mak’s voice was steeped in surprise. “I didn’t know you were a believer. Were you an acolyte in the temple before joining the crew?”

“Yeah, it’s not something I talk about much,” she admitted, her tone tinged with shyness. “But you know how important faith is to our people. I never found it hard to believe.”

Well, I did, Plav-tor-fel-mak thought, but didn’t say anything of the sort.

They continued in silence. Apparently, Est-mar-kort had picked up on his unwillingness to talk. The corridor ahead seemed endless, its shadows swallowing them whole, as if the ship itself sought to devour what remained of his life. The darkness seemed so tangible now, raw and physical, as if he was wading through black paint with every step he forced his tired body to take.

In front of them, adjacent to the passageway, was a large room. Once upon a time, there had been a glass wall between it and the corridor. Now, most of the transparent panels were crushed, the crystals—dull with dust—floating in the vacuum.

Plav-tor-fel-mak paused for a second to peer into the room, letting the beam of his flashlight dance over the broken furniture inside. Est-mar-kort glided up beside him, lending him the assistance of her own light. He didn’t know what he was looking for, but something compelled him to investigate.

He was just about to give up his search and continue their journey when his flashlight suddenly illuminated something horrific.

In the narrow beam, the face of First Mate Bouchard stared back at him, her face frozen in a scream of terror. Dead eyes, covered with ice crystals, seemed to watch him from inside the darkness.

A shrill, shrieking sound found its way out of his throat before he bit his tongue. Screaming would not benefit anyone in their current situation.

Looking at Est-mar-kort, the expression on her face told him she, too, had seen the gruesome remains of their first mate.

No, she couldn’t have—the woman was looking in the wrong direction. Yet, her face was twisted into a mask of horror. Slowly, Plav-tor-fel-mak positioned himself to see the scene from her perspective. What he saw inside the room made him wish he hadn’t.

Hanging next to First Mate Bouchard was the bloodied torso of Mission Specialist Suwannarat. Both Terrans were strung up on sharp, serrated metal beams, impaled with extraordinary force, resembling meat thrust onto skewers. The beams entered their torsos through their severed waists and exited them through their throats. Their arms were outstretched as if crucified, their hands pierced with metal shards to pin them to a second beam, strung horizontally behind their shoulders.

Angling his flashlight downward, he could see the lower parts of their bodies impaled on the same beams as their torsos.

No, he corrected himself. Not the same beams. Whoever had strung up their slaughtered teammates had exchanged Bouchard’s lower body for Suwannarat’s, and vice versa, like a paper doll flipbook of the damned.

And neither of them was wearing their spacesuit.

Leaving the gruesome scene, the dark thoughts Plav-tor-fel-mak had entertained for the past hour returned, stronger than ever. It was as if the shadows surrounding the horrific display of their colleagues had infected him, like black tendrils weaving their way through his nose and mouth into the deep recesses of his brain, whispering to him of forbidden deeds and tempting him with promises of riches, glory, and escape.

Shaking his head in an attempt to clear his mind, he decided to focus on an intellectual exercise in an attempt to silence the grim ideas he had been contemplating. Something had been bothering him about the exhibit of death they had just witnessed—something more than just the grisly content of the scene.

At first glance, it had almost looked ritualistic, like the work of a deranged serial killer or perhaps some murderous cult. Such things were not unheard of. But in his mind, he could see the anomalous details that told him such an explanation was much too naïve.

By now, Plav-tor-fel-mak was certain the desiccated alien body parts they had found belonged to the original crew of the vessel. Those, and the remains of his own teammates, were the only corpses they had discovered, and they had all been cut into pieces the same way—a clean cut going through skin and bone alike.

Whatever was out there hunting them was older than mankind, its patience stretching across more than eight million years between its first killing spree and its second. That kind of timeline didn’t match the profile of any serial killer he’d ever heard of. If this was a ritual, it was absurdly slow. And who was it for? Rituals were meant to serve the ones performing them, to offer meaning or power. But the arrangement of the bodies suggested they had been strung up more for the benefit of him and Est-mar-kort than for whoever had committed the gruesome acts.

Then there was the issue of the missing spacesuits…

No, he thought, the remains had not been placed at random around the ship. They had been carefully arranged in locations the perpetrator knew they would pass through, ensuring the crew would not miss the macabre exhibits. Even Sawhney’s body, stuffed deep into that access shaft, seemed to have been placed there on purpose. Plav-tor-fel-mak remembered the blood smeared at the entrance to the shaft, making sure they would not miss the body packed in there when they floated by.

And the spacesuits… In his mind, he imagined the same scenes they had encountered, but with the bodies still inside their suits. While horrific, the displays would have had significantly less emotional impact on their viewers, the helmets hiding the agony on the victims’ faces and the fabric of the suits covering their wounds.

The facts, taken together, pointed to a single chilling conclusion: the grotesque displays were meant to terrorize them as they ventured deeper into the derelict. The crucified bodies of Bouchard and Suwannarat had been a message directed at him, clear and unmistakable. This is what awaits you at the end of your path.

So be it, Plav-tor-fel-mak thought, but I’m still alive—and I plan to stay that way for as long as possible.

And with that, the dark thoughts he had struggled to banish from the forefront of his mind surged back with relentless force.

He glanced at his oxygen meter again. Thirty minutes, and no more than that, before he would share Murray’s fate. With no additional spare canisters, it would not be enough.

But his was not the only oxygen canister they had.

With greedy eyes, he stared at Est-mar-kort’s air cylinder, mounted at the back of her spacesuit, tempting him with its sweet, life-giving molecules. Like his, it was nearly empty, but together… together, they would probably be enough.

There was a good chance he would be able to reach the bridge.

A quick movement of his left arm was all it took to seize her throat, preventing her from escaping. Grunting with the effort, he pulled her toward him, holding his colleague in a vice-like grip, while his right hand unlocked her oxygen canister.

The entire thing took less than ten seconds. Ten seconds to condemn the young woman he had called a friend to death. Ten seconds to lose what little was left of his soul.

At first, Est-mar-kort did not understand what had happened. Frantically, she reached behind her back, trying to reattach the missing air cylinder, but it was not there. As she turned around, she saw Plav-tor-fel-mak floating there, holding the last thirty minutes of her life in his hand, and she understood what had transpired.

Panicking, she shouted into her microphone.

“Help me!” she screamed, her voice raw with desperation. “I can’t breathe! Please, give it back!” Her arms thrashed wildly, her legs kicking in the weightlessness, struggling to close the distance between them.

It was all in vain, of course, and she knew it. Taking her oxygen cylinder had been a deliberate choice of his, not an accident. If she didn’t get it back within the next half-minute, she would learn firsthand what Murray had previously experienced at the moment of her death.

Plav-tor-fel-mak started to drift away, using his maneuvering thrusters to increase the distance between them.

“Come back!” she shouted. “At least come back. You can have the canister. Just don’t let me die alone!”

But Plav-tor-fel-mak did not turn around.

Est-mar-kort swallowed, feeling her life ebb out of her. Panic dissolved, replaced by a newfound resolve. This was the hardest thing she would ever say.

"I…" She swallowed again, struggling to get the words past her dry throat. "I forgive you."

The words gave her little peace, but that was not their purpose. Peace would come soon, anyway. No, she said them not for her own sake, but for his. She meant them, and saying them was the right thing to do.

She coughed and started gasping for air as the last of the life-giving oxygen in her suit was replaced by carbon dioxide.

In the distance, Plav-tor-fel-mak vanished into the darkness of the corridor ahead. For the second time that day, he wished the comm system had a mute function.

Author's Note

The story you're reading is one of many set in the Lords of the Stars universe I've been creating over the past 30 years, where familiar characters and places reappear, and new favorites await discovery. Check out my profile to explore more stories from this universe.

Visit the official Lords of the Stars blog for more information about this hard sci-fi universe: https://lordsofthestars.wordpress.com