Chapter Six

Some seven hundred feet above the cursed wasteland, Furano Kon dangled from an overhang of 'Apep' and secured another magnetic bolt to the ruined hull.

High winds buffeted her as a misjudged leap caused her to tumble thirty feet and slam against the side of the broken tower.

Reaching a mile high, ‘Apep’ was a crashed alien Mothership that remained upright. It looked, for all the world, like the tip of an arrow lodged in the haunch of the planet, leaving the surrounding area to seep with radiation.

How it arrived was something to behold. Far from the slow spectral awe that sci-fi movies had sold, this gigantic, city-wide Spacecraft had appeared out of nowhere, as if the fabric of reality decided to part like a beaded curtain.

The shape resembled a spinning top, albeit one divided into tiers, which slowly rotated in the opposite direction to the top. Its gun-metal carapace moved silently, glinting dully in the midday sun and hung like a gothic borbel against the empty azure sky.

The reaction from the city was one of fear and ragged pandemonium.

A brief sting of amazement morphed into unease, then into a full-blown stampede that had everyone scattering to their cars. Mass religious hysteria broke out across the planet, awaiting the coming of the end times. Media helicopters swarmed the airspace like carrion birds until a more heavily armed squadron cleared them out of the area, forcing them to retreat from helicopters belonging to the nearest airbase.

Except this was not an invasion; it was more akin to a runaway train: a ship the size of a postcode on a collision course toward the city centre.

Upon impact, the shockwave vaporised Osaka in an instant, sending tens of thousands to an immediate afterlife.

An emerald-coloured blast expanded into a dome, as the ship tore a rent in the Earth that gouged for miles, throwing up deadly shrapnel, while turning organic matter into ash.

The cacophony of brutalised metal reverberated like a blind, drunken orchestra and buried itself halfway into dirt, leaving a scrap-yard of smoking ruin in its wake.

After a few days, Apep finally settled with no sound but for the lingering groan of twisted metal; a death rattle of some eldritch God, untouched for decades more. There it remained as a canker on the skyline, a constant reminder both hideous and celestial—a gravestone for a deleted population.

***

Furano hung off the towering Mothership, as the whiplash and rope burns faded after half an hour.

From then on, she doubled the care put into the ascent, with no more heroics or second-guessing. Secure, double-check and move on.

Again, she had donned a Haz-tac pressure suit, used for stealth missions inside radioactive areas. Upside down against a ledge, she tried to forget the biting cold winds, constantly reminding her of the fall that awaited her.

Furano slowly clambered up the side of the long ledge, secured a peg and lay down. Exhausted with both hands flat against her chest, she took several deep breaths and looked up at the ocean sky.

Wisps of ghostly clouds silvered with moonlight scudded across the night.

If this place had not been so treacherous, she would have made it her hangout spot or even a hideout, somewhere away from the chaos of civilisation. Glancing at her palm readout, she tapped the glove. Orange digital numbers scrolled into view, fluctuating back and forth until they flashed a confirmation. The rad count was insufficient to cook a chicken, but it was still within the intensive care range.

Crap.

The thief gathered up and walked toward the hull of the ship. It creaked and yawned, as fat puffs hissed out from random gaps, with the only clear entrance being a ventilation grill.

Furano sprayed a can of liquid nitrogen to shatter the grate's frame and touched all four sides of the entrance to see if it was cool enough to traverse. Satisfied, she crawled inside and was met with long, yawning metal creaks. The rest of the air duct had been sliced off and ended abruptly over a sheer drop.

Crawling on her belly, she shifted around and drew out the Grappler from the backpack. The Grappler was a polycarbonate launcher, resembling a nightstick and projected a strong metallic piton. It was more or less a miniature Harpoon.

Lining up the shot, she fired and watched its pointed end dig deep into the other side of the chasm. With a few safety yanks, Furano used a Carabiner to attach herself to he other end of the stick and slowly winched toward the other side.

Dangling freely, the thief secured herself with a rope and a chockstone before retracting the harpoon's end back into the case.

Furano carefully flattened herself against the wall, sidling the narrow perch on tiptoes.

Not wanting to bring down the catwalk with a high-velocity shot, The Thief scaled up a level by hand, as winds howled a mournful chorus interposed with heavy creaks from the downed spaceship.

Hauling herself onto the catwalk, Furano found the entrance mostly collapsed. Luckily, a section was open enough for her to crawl through, but only if she left the backpack behind.

Sighing, she slipped off the bag, unsnapped a rope belt and squirmed on all fours through the claustrophobic gap.

Halfway traversing the crawl space, a sizeable clearing was big enough for her to stand in. In front, a loose flex cable swayed dead centre among the wreckage of what looked to be an Alien elevator. She gave the cable a couple of urgent tugs to check it was secure and climbed up, walking up against the side until she reached the only floor not destroyed by wreckage. Swinging over to the elevator doors, she slipped in through the gap.

Furano caught her breath and looked around; it was darker than pitch and silent but for the occasional rattle and groan of the ship. She tapped on the night-vision, and his world fell into sickly green and black.

At first glance, the floor appeared marginally spacious, with the bones of small skeletons scattered across it.

The impact hit them hard; the impaled bodies, the severed limbs and the lopped off heads. It was carnage.

Yep, this was no pizza party.

The thief crouched to examine one of the skeletons. There was one too many eye holes for her liking; these guys must have been weird-looking even for Aliens.

Rising, Furano gave the surroundings a once-over. It appeared to be on some engineering deck, where there were metal grates which used to be the floor, now twisted and buckled. On the other side, many pipes were broken and wrenched out.

Everything was in an indecipherable language and appeared to be random etchings at first, carved into what the thief assumed was the control desk.

Nothing showed up on infrared, so she tapped off the goggles and lit up a hard beam from a pocket light. Furano ran a finger of light across the surface, illuminating more details: moon shapes, three dots, and two parallel wavy lines.

Searching around, she made her way through a series of fallen rooms, with downed floors that provided ramps to the next one. She finally found a room with no exits, but the numbers on her hand went wild, blanking out and turning into dashes. There was nowhere to go; the room was dark and empty, broken up by a few girders that had lanced through from above. Nothing made sense; the readings were erratic and off the charts, but nothing here provoked such a reaction. Then, out of instinct, she looked up and saw a clean-cut tunnel with something glowing on the other end.

She did not like the look of that glow; it looked too intense and liable to fry her on sight. However, the promise of hidden treasure overrode any caution. She had come this far after all. Aiming high, she lost the harpoon onto a ledge below the tunnel exit and ascended. Upon arrival, she pulled herself up and moved away to the safety of the next room.

Not good. The Haz-tac suit started to click rapidly, indicating excessive radiation levels.

Better get going, before I'm unable to. .

Moving from the vault to the archives room, Furano was astonished to learn that even Aliens, with their massively advanced technology, still relied on basic paper charts scratched in what passed for ink, using a penlight.

Furano pulled out a group of star-charts, each one housed in a library of telescopic tubes dotted around the room. She assumed this place must have been the navigation area, or at least the Archives, given its proximity to a vault.

After a series of false starts, she finally settled on something, the Alien equivalent of a heavy blueprint that felt waxy between fingers. It resembled some schematics for a power grid, drawn in such a bright lime green that she no longer needed the torchlight.

Got you.

The schematics led her to a particular pipeline, where she could tap and circumnavigate the ship's remaining power source. Using her Smartphone-sized codebreaker, she listened to the energy patterns like the tumblers of a safe. It would take over twenty minutes of agonising, pinpoint synchronisation before the first tumbler fell.

An hour had passed when Furano became distracted by a different set of sounds. Sounds independent of that of the ship.

Nearly...nearly...

The waveforms eventually settled into two perfect parallel lines. Furano quietly celebrated.

Bingo.

Re-routing the power supply to the lower chambers, she turned on the only lights on the Mothership and even activated a console or two, hoping they were the right ones.

Satisfied, Furano slipped the gizmo back into a pocket

More noise now. Not the ships, but something else is drawing closer. They had a rhythmic tapping, quiet at first, but betrayed a distinctive intonation.

It was soon joined by others, growing closer and louder, with many shuffled footfalls and guttural hisses—the sound of a horde coming closer.

Hearing the sludgy footslog and guttural moans, she stood wide-eyed and frozen to the core as a multitude of mutants drew nearer.

After a moment of panic, Furano quickly approached the nearest doorway. No luck. It was another fallen corridor, with no way to squeeze through or hide away. Upon seeing a fresh group arrive quicker than anticipated, she hurried back toward the map room, but slipped out of sight.

They had amassed in a cursed knot of abominations, leaving her nowhere to go but back and down. She quickly passed through what appeared to be a large antechamber, only to find another dead end. Half the floor was missing, with only a skeletal girder spanning the room over a five-storey drop. Time was short, and she could see a troupe of Moargs shuffling under the dim wink of emergency lights.

The Moargs shambled into the antechamber and immediately picked up Furano's scent. They uttered a blighted chorus of hissing; a coarse, sibilant clamour that drowned out the creaks and moans of their ship. Their blank button eyes surveyed the darkness for the source, remaining crowded in one spot, while Furano gripped the underside of the girder for dear life.

There was nothing to hook onto, so he was left to rely on his upper-body strength. Although Furano had trained for long stretches, the muscles in her arms began to feel like hot coals.

Fighting gravity, her hands may as well have screamed in protest. Down was not an option. Even if she managed to rappel, the fall would still break her bones, and the Moargs would have had the rest. Her only choice was to double-back the way she came while somehow avoiding the gaggle of monsters.

Using the shadow as a cloak, Furano hauled up onto the girder, steadying with the poise of a ballet dancer, before squatting down at the far end. The throng of monsters was too thick to slip through at speed, so he would have to go up and around quietly. As luck would have it, a drainpipe led from the top of the occupied rooms to a series of others.

She waited for them to disperse and kept low while tiptoeing at speed. Climbing onto the pipe, Furano slowly crept across the passage, above the sea of abyssal maws that opened and shut like clams in the wash of a tide.

Somewhere below, a nest of shiny, black tongues danced like agitated snakes. They could detect a faint scent, but could not pinpoint it, like a blind man looking for a bakery.

Their stodgy, mutated forms shambled, bumbled, and waddled on, allowing Furano to crawl unseen along the drainpipe into the map room. All was going well until the pipe snapped off, and all hell broke loose.

Jumping down into a clear part of the map room, Furano rolled away from thrashing limbs and fled toward the tunnel entrance before they could swarm around.

The Thief aimed the Harpoon at the far wall and shot it to full length. Success! Going by her gut, she deduced the cable length would leave her enough space to make it halfway down the tunnel. It was purely guesswork at that point.

Luckily, the maths held up, and she ended up dangling halfway in the tunnel as the cable length ran out. With little to no choice, she unclipped herself and landed with a parachute roll.

After a while, Furano managed to retrieve her backpack from the collapsed corridor, but going back the way she came was a lost cause. From here on in, everything was pure instinct and adrenaline. The thief improvised the exit; she guessed, fell back and tried again. Every labyrinthine corridor led to nowhere. The more dead ends she found, the more she was forced to retrace her steps. All on the hop, all with non-stop, with restless panic.

Meanwhile, all the commotion and ruckus of the escape had attracted a new set of Moargs; these were already on her tail before she had a chance to catch her breath.

They swarmed the corridor like a noisy, undulating torrent of cursed horrors. Reaching out, scratching at the backpack, hissing with contempt and hunger. By some miracle, Furano found a room and quickly barricaded the door.

Furano hopped a marginal gap, which slowed the mass of monsters to a trickle, and heaved a couple of large crates across the doorway, each one the size of a cupboard. That would not hold the tide back for long. Allowing herself a brief respite, her face glowed shiny with sweat.

The outer wall had collapsed, filling the room with a tangerine hue, and looking out toward the new-dawning sun.

I made it.

The crates barricading the door started to shift violently. Looking back,  the thief desperately tore off the Haz-tac suit, allowing the flimsy wingsuit underneath to flap ferociously in the high winds. She quickly stuffed everything she needed into the backpack and slipped it on. Shaken awake by the appearance of the rabid horde, Furano launched herself off the edge, spread her arms, and rode the currents home.