Levi stopped walking, the guilt arriving as a weight that sagged his shoulders, pressing down alongside everything else he was carrying. Tyler’s grunt cut short. The radio silence after. Asher turning away from his touch…
“Keep moving,” Asher said. “There are still two of those things in this place.”
Why won’t you touch me?
“Yeah,” Levi said.
They kept walking.
The screens were still lit up back in Engineering in front of Owen, Jasper, and Elliot. “Both remaining creatures are orienting tightly on Sector Nine, one is a deck above us, which explains why it didn’t make it into the kill zone,” Owen said. “With the others purged, there’s less signal noise, so it looks like they are moving faster than they were before.”
“So we know where they’re going?” Elliot asked.
“We know exactly where they’re going.”
“Then we use that information to find a way to get rid of them.” Levi watched the two creature dots moving towards the same destination.
Jasper was already at another console, running data. “Hey, Levi. Come look at this.”
The screen showed a graph with two lines on it, both timestamped against the blackout. “This one is the array’sbroadcast signal, it pulses on a steady frequency for in-ship and deep space comms. This is the signal we are picking up from the creatures. Now watch,” Jasper said as he played the timeline forward.
When the purge fired, both lines went flat.
“They went offline,” Jasper said. “All of them. Every creature on the ship, the second the array stopped broadcasting, even while they were dying, they just remained in roughly the same place.”
Owen’s data pads hit the floor. “Wait. Wait. Show me that again.”
Jasper played it again. “Whatever the creatures are, it looks like they just…give up with some sort of beacon?”
“Why didn’t they breach before now?” Levi asked.
“They were brought up, unnoticed, in surface samples,” Maddie piped in, walking up with her own notes on a tablet. “I’ve been looking at images from ship security from when they first emerged from containment and the remains of the ones from earlier. Look.”
Levi looked down at her tablet. The first image showed the creatures emerging from the containers, looking like they just stood up and broke the boxes they were in, rock and rubble all around them. The second image showed a charred version of one, sprawled out on the ground next to a crew member’s burnt corpse, its skin blistered and burst, revealing a strange network of organs and wiring. But right where a throat would meet a collar bone: a hole that looked like it had been grown rather than made by a weapon. “Are they…evolving?”
“More so adapting, I think,” Maddie said. “If they adapt to their surroundings, maybe it took until they were exposed to enough of our biology to breach? It’s just a theory, at the moment.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Elliot said, still staring at the screen with the signal readout. “If we can make them dormant, we can find them and shoot them out of the airlock with manual overrides. No one else needs to die.”
The room was very still.
The idea was too clean, too simple, toosurvivable.Find the array, kill the signal, the two remaining creatures freeze wherever they happen to be standing, and a team walks the corridors to find them and shoot them into space?
There’s something we’re all missing here. I know it. It can’t be this simple.
“Where’s the array?” Levi asked.
“External,” Owen said. “Port side hull, Sector Nine. Access is through the Sector Nine exterior airlock, but that section’s lost life support. We can’t walk there from inside.”
“Can we use EVA suits to get to Sector Nine?” Elliot asked.
“The main EVA bay in Sector Four took creature damage early in the breach. An automated purge ran through it. Those suits are gone.” Owen scrolled to the equipment manifest. “But the command EVA locker in Sector Two is intact.”
Jasper pulled up the locker specs on his console. “Reynolds. Elliot. Chief Kane. All biometrically calibrated.”
“Two usable suits,” Elliot said as he straightened, the decision already in his shoulders before he said it. “I’ll go.”
Jasper brought up the array schematics. “Three power connections, a signal modulator, and a broadcast relay. Disconnect any two of the three power leads and the signal goes dark.”
