Requiem (38 page)

'I'm... I'm
alright. I feel like I should see this.'

Therin said
nothing. She played the video from exactly four hours before it
went dark.

The camera was
at the far end of the outside hall, facing towards the bridge.
Therin cycled through the other cameras on board the ship. The
recordings showed the crew moving through the ship which was, at
the time, rotating fast enough to generate the gravity to hold them
to the internal walls of the cylinder. The cameras showed the crew
eating at the mess hall table, piloting the ship, running through
everyday duties. Therin fast forwarded through the video, passed
the scout ship passing through the Atlas Gate into the Obal system,
then resumed normal play. Most of the crew were now running through
the ship. Three had rushed to the armoury to suit up and arm
themselves. One of the others had manned the manual gun at the
bridge and another was franticly suiting himself up in the
navigation room.

Therin switched
to the external camera which was attached above the outer airlock
at the back of the ship by the engine, in a part of the ship that
didn't rotate with the rest of the body. The camera was looking
directly at the Obal system's star.

'Do you see
that?' Therin said to Seline.

'See what?'

Therin pointed
at a spot on the video screen. 'That red light in the distance,
it's getting bigger.'

Seline moved
closer to the screen and looked at where Therin's finger was
pointing. Caught amidst the edge of the star's light was a sharp
point of light. It was growing in size, approaching the ship.
Therin switched the feed back to the ship's internals. The gunner
had left his post and ran to the armoury and was suiting up while
one of the other three, who was now geared up at, took his place at
the turret. The other two had armed themselves and were moving
through the ship towards the engine. Therin switched cameras again.
Back to the navigation room. The man had managed to get his suit on
and was now standing at the horseshoe console. Seline guessed that
he was giving directions to the rest of the crew.

Therin switched
back to the external camera. The red light had almost halved the
distance between it and the ship. Seline's hands were fidgeting at
her side. She crossed them over her chest.

A shape was
forming around the approaching red light as it emerged from the
glare of Obal's star. It was a dark sphere, metres across, the red
light shone from its centre. The scout ship had opened fire on the
red light but the bullets only broke upon its surface without
effect. The sphere was almost at the scout ship, heading straight
for the lab at the back.

Therin switched
to the lab camera just a second before a flash of light cut through
the hull. The hole they had entered through. Seline was holding her
breath as debris was sucked through the open wound in a single,
violent wave, threatening to turn the entire ship inside out. Both
of the Yurrick that had been making their way through the ship were
dragged from the ship and tossed out into the void. Seline took
strange comfort in the fact that they probably would've been killed
or at least knocked out from slamming into the tables and panels
that were thrown out with them.

'I guess you
were right about the two lost bodies,' said Seline.

Therin said
nothing.

'Why is it on
mute?' asked Seline.

'It's not on
mute. The camera's must have been damaged. None of them are
reporting any sound.'

Therin cycled
through the cameras. They were back in the navigation room, thanks
to the tightly sealed door the room hadn't depressurised with the
rest of the ship but the horseshoe console had been turned into a
charred and wrought piece of metal.

Seline looked
at the console, bathed in the light from the video projection. She
was looking at it like she expected it to talk, like it would
explain itself.

The Yurrick
who'd been at his station was gone. Therin rewound the footage and
played it again. The Yurrick was standing at the console when the
room shuddered and rocked around him and the console enveloped the
lower half of his body in a burst of light and flame and shrapnel.
The blast ripped straight through him, disintegrating his legs and
flinging the rest of him against the far wall and out of view of
the camera. Black smoke poured out of the ruined console.

Therin still
said nothing at this. She switched back to the lab camera just as
the large, dark sphere, just small enough to fit through the hole
it had cut, drifted into the ruined vessel. Like a human's glass
eye detached from its socket the sphere shifted its iris over the
wreckage.

Therin cycled
through the cameras again and found the two remaining and living
crew members in the tank room. They'd managed to avoid the worst of
the flying debris while the ship had been disembowelled by the
blast. They had armed themselves with their rifles and were moving
through the ship to confront the eye.

They stood on
either side of the partition separating the tank room and the lab
at the back of the ship when a section of the wall above their
heads exploded and the floating eye burst through. It hovered above
the two Yurrick's heads and set its sight upon them, oblivious, or
rather, indifferent to the bullets they discharged into it
point-blank.

The two Yurrick
had backed out of the tank room into the lab, covering their
retreat at the same time but the eye followed them back through. It
didn't fire upon them, it only glared at them with menace that even
Seline could feel, like a festering ulcer inside her stomach.

Therin had
switched back to the lab camera again to see more clearly. The two
Yurrick had stopped firing. They had backed through the main lab to
the open door of the secondary lab where Therin and Seline had
found their bodies. Their deaths could not be far away.

The eye looked
as though it was ready to pounce, like it was waiting for some more
perfect moment to strike. The Yurrick's guns had been abandoned and
left to float away from their hands. They were still stepping back
into the secondary lab. Their movements were painfully slow, as if
they were hypnotised. Their visors and eyes were directed up
towards the eye and it, in turn, was focused like a laser into
theirs.

Seline wanted
to scream at the Yurrick to look away from it, to run, to punch it,
anything other than just helplessly stare at it but they only
continued their slow steps backwards. They were now at the
threshold of the door to the second lab and looked as though they'd
given up their bizarre attempts at retreat. Seline was still
waiting for something to happen, for the floating eye to leap at
them and devour them.

The walls of
Seline's throat grated against one another as she swallowed, the
sound was almost deafening. Just when she thought the camera
footage had frozen, there was movement. The two Yurrick fell
backwards, a stray arm from one of them knocking the switch on the
inside of the door and sealing them in their tomb while the
floating eye turned from them, apparently having lost any and all
interest. It shot across the room and exited the ship through the
hole it had made. Therin switched to the external camera which
showed the sphere accelerating and flying off back towards the Obal
system's star. Although at this point the entire ship had been
knocked out of alignment and was spinning on its axis so the
departure of the floating eye was only captured in shot for about a
minute before the ship's rotation lost its visual.

They continued
to watch for one more of the scout ship's dazed rotations but the
eye had vanished from sight amidst the darkness. Therin closed the
video. Belameir was the first to break the silence.

'Is that all
there is? There must be more than that.'

'Would you get
him off the comm?' demanded Therin. 'I came over here to get away
from his damn voice. I'd rather not have it beamed directly into my
ear.'

'I'll try,'
said Mercer.

'Acknowledge
upload of the secondary blackbox files?' said Therin.

'Upload
acknowledged.'

Therin looked
around the room at nothing in particular. Seline kept her eyes on
the wall and her night-vision off, remembering with more clarity
than she'd like, the bifurcated corpse floating only metres away
from her.

'That's
enough,' said Therin. 'We've got everything we need. We'll have the
video analysed properly once we're back on the cruiser.' Therin
directed her next words at Mercer. 'Tell the Doctor to get
everything ready for the bodies. Two of them are still sealed in
their suits and the other is pretty well frozen. Also, send some
drones over here, I'm not going to carry all those rock samples by
hand.'

'Got it,' said
Mercer. 'Rolling out the welcome mat and sending over the
emissaries.'

Therin looked
at Seline again. 'I want you to go back to the other two bodies and
bring them to the hull breach. We're going to take them back with
us to the cruiser.'

'What
about-'

'
I'll
take the partial body,' said Therin.

'Right,' said
Seline.

Therin and
Seline brought the bodies back to the cruiser. Seline jumped first
while Therin stayed in the scout ship and carefully tossed two of
the bodies over and then told Seline to take them to the med-bay
while Therin brought over the last body. With the help of zero
gravity, Seline escorted both bodies to the med-bay and left the
bodies with the Doctor in the morgue. She then made her way to the
armoury, changed out of her space suit and joined Therin in the
lift. As it ascended to the bridge Therin kept her eyes fixed on
its doors. 'You did well over there,' she said to Seline.

Seline ran
awkward fingers through damp hair. 'I fainted. I don't think I can
say that I passed the test.'

'But you didn't
come running home afterwards. You stuck with it, you saw it
through.'

Seline looked
down at the heavy boots wrapped around her feet, holding her to the
floor. She scratched a non-existent itch on her arm. 'Thanks,' she
said.

The lift doors
opened. The mission debriefing had already begun. Tialus was
speaking to the crew. Even the Doctor had come up to take part, he
was spinning something, two thin, black flash drives, in his long,
wiry fingers.

'From what
we've gathered,' said Tialus, 'the scouts were in the Obal system
for no more than one hour before the sphere destroyed the ship and
killed the crew. They observed the sphere for about twenty minutes
as it made its approach. The records on the blackbox tell us that
the crew attempted to hail the sphere, to communicate with it, but
it gave no reply. The crew then began prepping themselves for the
inevitable.'

'Do you think,
maybe if they hadn't shot at it then it wouldn't have attacked in
the first place?' asked Belameir.

'The crew
followed protocol. The sphere gave no response to their hails and
showed no signs of backing off from their warning shots.'

'And it brushed
off the shots that actually hit it like they were rain water,' said
Mercer. 'I've never seen anything like this.' He looked at Tialus.
'Do you recognise the tech on this thing? Does it look familiar at
all?'

All eyes turned
to Tialus. The darkness of her eyes made it seem like she was
staring at all of them at once.

'No,' she said.
'I'm certain it's not of Sceril construction. The design doesn't
fit at all. And from what we know of the Sceril they were
relatively peaceful and so far advanced that weapons like this
would probably not have been necessary. Not to mention that the
Sceril have been extinct for almost a hundred thousand years.'

'Do you think
that 'weapon' is the right way to describe this thing?' asked Sear.
'It's more than just a gun. Whatever it was doing, it wasn't just
trying to destroy the ship and the crew. If it wanted to do that
then it would have just blasted it and everything on board but it
didn't, it did something else to the two survivors.'

'The killing
only seems to be a part of whatever it's trying achieve.' Tialus
looked at the Doctor and the small drives he was still spinning
around his fingers. 'You told me you had something to show us in
that regard, Cherin.'

The Doctor
stepped forward. 'It's not much but I managed to remove the
biometric scanners from the two intact bodies that Seline and
Therin brought back on board.' The Doctor attached the scanners to
a small port on the side of the debriefing station.

The scout
ship's camera feed, which had been left playing, was interrupted by
the holographic images of two transparent brains. They expanded in
size to fill up most of the space in the debriefing station's
circular panel. They looked similar to the human brain in shape
although there was no clear division between the left and right
hemispheres.

Having never
seen a Yurrick's brain before Seline looked over the rest of the
crew's faces to see if what she was looking at was normal. No one
voiced any concerns so she assumed that it was.

The Doctor
played with his display screen for a moment before the two brains
lit up in a bright flash of colour. Thin ribbons of fluorescent
blues and greens and pinks and reds and a thousand other shades
spread in dense bundles of light throughout the holographic brains.
They began at the base of the brain, and spread down to the spine
and upward, stretching throughout the brain in thin wisps of colour
like individual strands of hair, breaking apart and reforming
faster than the eye could follow.

'What we're
seeing here,' said the Doctor, 'are the two scout's brains just as
the eye apparently locks on to them, just as it began... for lack
of a better word, to hypnotise them.'