Ripped them apart and bathed the bridge in their blood. Space really pissed me off.
I moved on across the room into another hallway that led into a mess hall. I killed the crew sitting at their lunch and the cooks in the strange-looking kitchen. I found the crew quarters past the mess and killed the two aliens in their beds.
I found the poor soul doing inventory in a storage unit and killed him, too.
Past the crew quarters and the storage room was another gigantic door that led back into the big hallway of the cargo hold. The ship made a loop then. I backtracked through the bridge and found, behind the captain’s console, another biometrically opened, seamless door. I picked up a body to open it into a hallway. Then stairs led to another biometric blast door the size of a bank vault, that opened into an engine room with vaguely catwalk type walkways suspended over pulsing engines submerged in clear liquid, and three aliens working on a huge computer monitor in the suspended square space over the engines.
I tossed two of them into the water below the catwalks. They screamed once, and then their bodies froze. So like liquid nitrogen coolant stuff.
Cool.
It was then that I remembered I was supposed to leave one alive. I’d already killed all the aliens on the bridge. Whoops.
The last alien in the engine room I picked up by its throat. It was its lucky day! It kicked and squirmed, whistling at me furiously. I shook it hard enough to threaten a snapped spine, and the shark stilled. I carried it back through the long halls, down the stairs to the cargo hold, and started opening doors to check for prisoners.
Three extra rooms held crates and nothing else. One was our room, and I moved past it without opening the door. The room to the right of ours was empty.
It was the last room I went to check that the alien Designated Survivor really struggled. He did not want to go into that room. I gave him a rough shake and pressed my teeth hard into the skin at his temple so he could feel my growl through his thick skull. He stopped struggling.
I held him up, and the door opened.
The room looked similar to ours, only no cages, and it had high ceilings. In the center was a glass tube lit up with orange lights.
Inside that tube was a monster.
It was trussed up like Hannibal Lecter, face mask and all. Only its straight jacket had metal bands suspended from the ceiling by chains inside the tube. It lifted its head when I approached the glass and stared at me. When our eyes met, a jolt of awareness sparked through me. Unease whispered at the back of my mind, and I pushed the feeling away.
Four eyes shining through the mask glowed a pale yellow. They were elongated almond-shaped with smaller secondary eyes directly behind the primary ones. It had horns. Hard ridges ran from the forehead, between the horns, and disappeared down its spine. I leaned in closer to the glass for a better look and realized the facewasthe mask. A horned face that looked like a half mask you’d see on Halloween. Black plates covered the entire upper half of its face, covering from below the cheekbones.
It looked like it made up the top part of its mouth, too. The lower jaw was smooth, shiny black skin, the mouth a seam between skin and plates. A mouth that was filled with nasty looking needle teeth that it showed me in a snarl, its faceplate lifting up and away from its black gums almost like a shark’s mouth. The gums pushed out a little from its face to give me a very in-depth view of the many, many teeth. It lunged forward in the chains and lit up like a rave. I jerked back away from the glass with a yip, my heart in my throat. I was shaking hard enough to make my teeth chatter.
Bioluminescent yellow lines and dots ran along its body, outlining rigid muscles. It allowed me to see the whole of what I was looking at. The thing was massive. Taller and broader than even my shifted form.
It hadtails. Three of them. They thrashed around on the floor in a hostile warning. Its shiny black skin caught the glare of the orange lights of its cage and its own glowing lines, making it gleam in the hold’s gloom. The hard muscles of its wide chest and thick neck flexed as it strained against the metal crisscrossed around it, arms and hands bound in manacles, its claws flexed. Sickle-shaped and at least three inches long, they looked like they could do some serious damage.
Just what the hell were the shark assholes thinking, having this thing on board with their terrible security?
It was standing on legs similar to mine in my current form, but its feet only had three clawed toes. Freaky.
We were so fucked if this thing got out.
I crouched into a defensive position when the beast spoke.
Even through the thick class of its tube prison, it sounded like a mountain was trying to talk to me. The vibrations of its voice rattled in my chest. It sounded straight up like Black Speech from Mordor and that was all the sign I needed to get the fuck out of this room.
It roared when I ran out into the hall and let the door shut behind me.
I held the trembling body of the engine room shark asshole up and shook him.
“The fuck is that?” I shouted into his face. I was sweating, the churning in my gut threatened to bring up all the good alien shark meat I’d eaten. Nightmares. I was going to have so many nightmares about that thing.
He whistled and garbled at me. I needed the girls to translate.
I moved to our cargo door and banged on it.
“It’s me. Don’t. Shoot,” I said. I didn’t need them killing my shark before I could ask him very prudent questions about the Terrible Terror in the other room.
I held him up to the door and when it opened, Patty rushed out, dipped around the dangling shark, and wrapped her arms around my waist. She didn’t seem to mind the blood getting smeared all over her.
