Pirra wondered if the Hev in here would be hostile to her; sometimes, beings altered were hostile to anything and everything, according to old spacers’s stories. She’d never known if there was any truth to them and she had hoped never to learn.
Thousands had been trapped in here, they’d said, but those few she saw were in corners, facing the bulkheads. One was gnashing his teeth furiously, but biting nothing. Others were pulling their fur out in clumps like rad-victims. All of them showed heavy signs of alteration, elements of their bodies changed in ways that defied description.
She tried not to look at them. She had a mission to accomplish . . . and she felt a fear of looking at them that bordered on superstitious.
Two lefts . . . She took them and then took the right. Looking up at the ceiling for the hole upwards, she began to see the corruption in the ship itself.
The walls were beaded with strange bumps that she felt a sudden fear would open and look at her with metallic eyes. Nothing happened, but she took every effort to not touch any surface.
“Drone 2, where are you?” she asked, looking around. It wasn’t here, and they were not supposed to stray far unless ordered.
A beep from behind alerted her and she looked back.
The drone was struggling to keep up. She wasn’t sure why, until it began to spin.
One of its side thrusters had altered. It flowed like a liquid, sloshing back and forth, and each time it sloshed away from the main body it seemed to strain, as if trying to pull itself free.
The liquid took a form, like limbs trying to grasp for something, anything.
Before she could give it an order, the liquid seemed to crystallize and shot out to adhere to a bulkhead like a web. It began to pull the doomed drone towards the surface.
Electronic alerts flashed in her vision, telling her the myriad malfunctions the drone was suffering.
She felt like she was watching a death.
But she couldn’t spare the time.
“Third hole in the ceiling,” she muttered, consciously wiping out all the alerts and removing the drone from her system. It shut down behind her.
Seeing the hole, and how corrupted it was, she was dismayed at its narrowness. Could she even get through that without touching anything?
“Drone 1, go through and confirm there’s a path. Do not touch any surfaces.”
The drone began towards the entrance, and she saw that it could no longer fly straight.
It was the air in here, she realized. It wasn’t as bad as being in contact with a solid, but it wasn’t helping. And the deeper they went, the worse the effect was getting.
Looking down the hall, she realized it extended on and on in a way that was not right. It twisted and turned. No ship corridor did that, and no ship had a reason to even have a corridor this long.
Was it already affecting her? She couldn’t know, not yet.
The drone went up into the hole and beeped that it was clear.
Looking up, she thought that if she tucked her arms and legs she could clear it. Holding her breath, she jetted up as straight as she could.
It was only three meters, but it felt like a kilometer.
As her head came out the other side, she saw the door to the computer room – closed. But it didn’t matter, as it had turned into a web of frail-looking strands that outlined every shape of the old door. They had the color of old dried bones.
She’d have to break it.
“Drone 1, cutting laser. Take this down.”
The drone went at it, keeping back and using jets of air to push each piece of loose debris away from itself and her.
A crackle came on her comm. It was distorted. But she could hear two words clearly;
“Pirra . . . hurry . . .”
Her heart fluttered faster in her chest. “Drone 1, ram the door and break it,” she ordered.
The drone obeyed without question, but she still didn’t feel good about it.
Moving back to avoid the debris, the drone obediently smashed through the door – it was as dry and weak as it looked. After the first few hits the drone seemed unharmed, but she realized that it was slowly turning the same color as the webs. Its shape was changing, becoming pointed and slowly swelling at the end until it looked almost like a femur.
Then it shattered on the door.
Letting out a curse, she jetted back to dodge the chunks of door and drone that scattered away from the area.
She felt something hit her boot, but didn’t see damage. But it might be enough to start to alter it.
Shooting forward, she saw that a hole just large enough had been created. Tucking her limbs, she ducked through into the room.
The room was an unnatural horror, and even looking at it made her eyes hurt. She felt tears well in them, and she tried to focus on the computer core.
It was hardly any better to look at; it was a mass of flesh where it had once been metal. Bulges that pulsed unnaturally covered it, like some sort of organ system. Liquid moved through arteries that she thought might have once carried coolant.
Looking quickly through the instructions for purging the core, she let out another curse.
“Useless!” she hissed.
There was no interface left, she couldn’t possibly begin a safe shutdown! There wasn’t even a hard-eject button.
Her comm crackled again, and she listened for anything important, but what she did hear curdled her blood.
It was moaning, it was sobbing. It was white noise that her brain nonetheless imagined were sounds of pain. There was no intelligence in it, but somehow she felt like she was hearing pain. A loss, ending in a quiet whimper.
“It’s just white noise,” she bit out, to hear something in contrast to that horrible sound.
Or was it just noise?
She looked around and saw that there were windows in the room that were intact. Standing in stark contrast to the metal that had succumbed to the unnatural changes, the windows seemed near perfect.
She moved nearer one, and saw that they were pitted and had large cracks, but appeared otherwise unaltered.
And behind that window she found out where the missing Hev had gone.
Other Terrestrial 