“Oh shit,” Kat’s voice crackled through the headset, filled with terror. “Captain get thefuckback here.Now!Life… life… lifeform… detected…”
Even Kat could be rattled, it seemed.
But it was seeing the thrusters lighting up that really put the fear into Sonya. It was an egregious violation of protocol, firing up the engines with an astro outside the hull. Kat was breaking acardinal rulebecause there was something behind her.
She knew she should listen to Kat: break into a run and pound back as fast as she could to the spacecraft. It’s what Kat would have done if the situation had been reversed.
But she wasn’t Kat. She was Sonya. Sonya with the mind that wouldn’t stop asking questions. Sonya who’d dreamed of exploring the cosmos as a little girl, whose fantasy was not a wedding or meeting a handsome prince, but making first contact with a new intelligent species. Sonya who obsessed over each new finding and discovery. And now there was something novel behind her. Dangerous, obviously, but new and fresh enough to make Kat sputter and break protocol.
Lifeform.The word swirled in her thoughts, rising to stand out from everything else. Sonya was running, and she knew she should, but the promise of a new lifeform tugged at her even through the panic.
Don’t do it, she told herself, even as she felt her neck turning her head. It was the oldest, stupidest pitfall in the history of humanity: looking behind you when you were running away. But she was going to do it anyway.
The shape loomed over her, its movements rough and powerful. Just the sight of its shadowy bulk, the strength of it evident in its movements and speed, squeezed the blood from Sonya’s head and made her stomach hollow out. It was twice her size. Bi-pedal, humanoid in shape. Its arms were pumping at its sides as it thundered toward her. It was feral, fast, and wild, and it plucked at a primal cord of fear in Sonya’s gut. Adrenaline surged into her blood, her vision narrowing to a single focus: escape.
She turned and ran from it, faster than before, faster than she thought possible. She was scrambling, her thoughts moving quicker than her body. She had seen its face: dark eyes with a watchful intelligence had stared right into her from beneath a furrowed brow. Its features were human-like: a nose and a mouth arranged where they were expected to be. A pleasant combination of features, actually.
But the creature’s human appearance was more disturbing than it was reassuring, especially because of its size, its jagged, animal motions. The grunts, the speed, the singular focus in its eyes: that of a hunter, after prey.
To her horror, she was turning her head again. She felt detached from her body as this happened; her mind was willing one thing, and her flight instinct was willing another.
It was much closer this time. Thick ropes of muscles flexed in its arms and legs as it ran, the dark eyes hovering over the snarling, open mouth nestled in its facial hair. Its skin filled her vision, strangely illuminated and faintly blue.
Her curiosity was like an anchor, dragging behind her. She stumbled, whipped her head back toward the ship, and urged herself to run faster, even as she hesitated. She was pulled like a magnet toward the creature, unable to look away.
It was sentientlife.Finally. Andshewas discovering it—
“Captain get thefuckback onto this ship!” Kat screamed over the comms.
Kat’s shriek worked like a slap to the face. It wacked the awe out of Sonya’s chest and squeezed her amygdala. The tunnel vision narrowed; the curiosity evaporated. She had one goal in an instant: flight.
She spun around, boots digging into dust and arms pumping hard at her sides.
She couldfeelthe creature’s heavy body pounding the ground behind her. The vibrations traveled from the soles of her feet, up through her legs, rattling her teeth. The fear inside her became black and all-consuming.
Closing the distance to the ship seemed to take an eternity. She lunged, five feet from the gangplank, which Kat had already triggered to retract from up top. She fell flat on her stomach, arms splayed at her sides, and started clambering up, when she felt the alien grip her ankle. She panicked, waving her arms frantically, clawing hopelessly at the ridged walkway.
She was being pulled back. The force of the alien’s pull was so strong, so obviously superior, that Sonya gave up within seconds. Her fingers ached, jammed into the grate of the gangplank, and she knew she wouldn’t win.
In that terrifying moment she had the revelation, the one she should have had from the beginning. It was this, whateverthiswas, that must have been the cause of the exploratory mission’s disappearance.
Even if she were to die, at least she wouldn’t have to live with the mystery of what had happened. A sense of mild satisfaction—inappropriate, and useless, but satisfaction nonetheless—came over her.
She liked solving mysteries that much.
The satisfaction stayed with her as her fingers slipped and the tendons in her arm strained. She was definitely going to be pulled away, and now it was only a question of within how many seconds.
She craned her neck to look up at the top of the shuttle. “Take off, Kat. Go. Get this data back to the ship, send a—new—team—”
“What the…?” Kat’s face appeared in the porthole up above. “What? No! Fuck!” she screamed.
Sonya’s fingers were screaming with pain now, slipping from the grate. She looked back at the creature, kicking her feet. Her kicks were half-hearted: she had resigned herself to her fate, and even she knew it.
The creature met her eyes. It was a terrifying moment, but for a split second, she really believed she saw something human in them. Whatever it was, it worked its way inside of her, turning things upside-down for a split second. That was all that was needed for her fingers to relax and slip from the plank.
The creature instantly pulled her harder, so there was no chance to catch another row of grating. She regretted the moment of softness immediately and let out a shriek as she flew over the gangplank and then over the rough ground, being dragged by her foot at an unimaginable speed.
She looked at the ship: it was disappearing into the horizon, sinking away like a stone dropped into a pool.
