Xenonauts: Crimson Dagger (11 page)

Mikhail’s vision was spinning—a combination of mental trauma and the attack from Hemingway.
What is going on?
Groggily, he placed his hands on the floor and attempted to push himself up. Blood trickled from his nose and ears. He felt faint.

The silence died as a resonating pulse emerged from every direction. Along the ceiling and walls, red lights pulsed with an almost organic rhythm. Every active monitor in the room flashed, their former screens replaced by red alien glyphs.

Hemingway…what did he just do?
Rolling over awkwardly, Mikhail stared across the room at the American captain. Hemingway was standing over the console, staring down as if in some sort of trance. Then, ever so slowly, he turned his head to Mikhail. Raising his M3, the American marched toward him.

Panic struck Mikhail. “Captain…” Quickly, he reached for his own weapon, only to realize that it had fallen from his shoulder. It lay directly between him and the ever-approaching Hemingway. There was no way Mikhail could get it in time.

The look in Hemingway’s eyes was devoid of emotion. He looked like a zombie. Submachine gun in position to fire, he stopped within several meters of Mikhail. His dead stare locked onto his Russian counterpart.

It has control of him. The same presence that had control of me.
Mikhail had merely been influenced. This was far beyond that. Before he’d ever set foot in Iceland, Mikhail had been warned about American treachery. Now he was facing it in a way he’d never expected. “Do not do this! It is not you!”

The shot rang out; blood splattered Mikhail’s face. But nothing had struck him. No bullet, no pain. By the time he looked back up, Hemingway was already falling. The captain thudded against the floor face-first. Behind him, her Makarov raised, was Nina. For several seconds the sniper remained frozen, her wide eyes locked with Mikhail from across the room. Then slowly, her shoulders released. Nina slumped back against the wall, exhausted but alive.

Mikhail’s reaction couldn’t have been more different. Growling in pain as he shoved up to his feet, he stumbled past the crumpled body of Hemingway to the console. The feverish pace of the act prompted Nina to sit up and take notice.

Mikhail scrutinized the display once more, the glyphs on its surface morphing and changing at a pace too fast to keep up with, flipping and spinning and shifting. Occasionally disappearing, like numbers in a countdown. Numbers in a countdown.

Hemingway had done it.

“Captain?” asked Nina exhaustedly, rising to shuffle toward him.

Looking around, Mikhail studied the other monitors in the room. What he saw was impossible to misinterpret. Red symbols in the shape of the alien spacecraft, set to loop with the same animation every few seconds. An explosion. The sense of urgency struck Mikhail immediately.

We need to get out of here.
Down the corridors. Out of the entry hole. Across the mud field. With a ship this size, how big would the explosion be? They were standing in the heart of the whole thing. Even if the countdown was twenty minutes long, it might not be enough time to get out of range.
I can’t stop the countdown—I can’t even recognize the controls. What is my plan?
Between the lights, the sounds, and the chaos of the situation itself, the environment was anything but conducive to thinking clearly. Mikhail had never needed clarity more.

Nina repeated breathlessly, “Captain, what is going on?”

“This ship is self-destructing.”

Her jaw dropped.
“What?”

“There was no communication from the gray alien, there was no life flashing before my eyes,” Mikhail said. “I was under the influence of an alien presence. It made me think I had received privileged information that would help us defeat it. It made me think I had gained an advantage when in reality, it was influencing me to help it.” Stepping to the room’s center, he surveyed all the other monitors, each one flashing in its own way, revealing alien hieroglyphs he couldn’t read. “When I figured out what was going on, it released it me and took Hemingway instead.”

Shaking her head perplexingly, Nina said, “Why would…why would it make you blow up the ship?”

“I don’t know! Maybe it realized it had lost. Maybe it needed something else to do the job.” They hadn’t run across a single reptile after their experience with the gray alien, other than the one-eyed reptile that’d regenerated. Everything else had been a robot. Maybe the presence, whatever it was, could only control organics. Humans would have been its only option. Running a hand through his hair, Mikhail racked his brain for a solution. The only moments of truth he’d received from the presence were the brief glimpses of its intentions just before their connection broke. Could anything be drawn from that?
Escape. It was trying to escape.
If that was true, that meant there was a way off the spacecraft.

“Is there anything flashing on any of these screens to indicate directions?” Mikhail asked. “A place to go for a ship that is about to explode, some means of ejection?”

Nina scoured the displays. The image of the ship exploding was everywhere. There were red lights flashing, but none of them seemed indicative of any instruction or guidance.

“
Come
on,” Mikhail murmured under his breath. “How are you getting out of this, you alien son of a whore?” He had no idea what the entity’s means of escape was, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that among the few options he and Nina had remaining, this was the only one that bore any potential to be life-saving. A glance at the hieroglyphic countdown revealed that a quarter of the symbols were already gone. They were running out of time. “We could look here for ten minutes and not find a clue. Come, we must leave now. We will find the escape route on our own.”

Touching his good arm, Nina said, “Mikhail, if you are right, would not every alien on this ship be going to the same place?”

“If I am right,” he said, “there are no other aliens left.” That presence needed a human for a reason. Kneeling down next to Hemingway, Mikhail felt the American captain for a pulse. There was none. Nina had shot him straight through the heart. If she was taken over by that entity, the next heart to receive a bullet would be his. Glancing back to her as she reloaded her submachine gun, he offered the obligatory warning. “Nina, if you feel a presence in your mind, resist it. Both our lives depend on it.”

“I will, captain.”

Mikhail nodded. “Let’s go.” Reclaiming the alien rifle—the only weapon that seemed effective against the guardians—he led Nina out of the bridge.

Much like the bridge, the corridors of the spacecraft were aglow with red flashing lights. The pulse, unrelenting in its consistency, resonated on as the pair tracked down the hall. At the direction they were traveling, they were following the ship’s downward tilt. Mikhail had opted to exit the bridge through the door Hemingway and his team had entered through; he’d been everywhere else and seen no signs of an escape method.

Where was that thing escaping to?
The brief connection he’d shared with the entity had only served to inform him of the alien’s state and intentions. He hadn’t been able to determine anything concrete, such as where the being was or where it was headed. He had an inkling that either the center or the rear of the vessel held the answer, if only for the fact that they hadn’t come across anything resembling a means of escape in the forward section. Assuming the ship’s interior was symmetrical—an assumption that could have easily been wrong—there’d be nothing in the opposite wing to the one they’d first entered. He was being led by educated guesses. It was better than being led by an alien presence.

The pain in Mikhail’s shoulder was nearly unbearable. Though he still maintained the functionality of both arms, the last thing he wanted to do was have to fire that alien weapon again. Stopping at the first intersection he and Nina came across, he scanned all four directions. Nikolai’s lifeless body lay sprawled further down one of the corridors. In fact, the very room Mikhail had scrambled into to escape the first guardian could be seen, only several doors down. It all confirmed his symmetrical theory.

Continuing forward, he left the intersection behind him, traveling deeper into the vessel. This was the same route Hemingway had taken after they’d split into two teams, except Mikhail was moving in the opposite direction. Doors lined both sides of the hall.
The escape route could be in any of these—how can we check them all with such little time?
Moving to the first in a long row of doors, Mikhail opened it. Human-sized tubes were lined up across its far wall, some sort of liquid churning within.
Fascinating, but not a means of escape.
Onto the next. “Check the doors on the other side, quickly!” Nina affirmed, and they began working their way down.

One room after the other, one glance within after another, yet nothing helpful was discovered. Supply rooms followed rooms with corpses strewn about from the crash, which followed rooms with no discernible purpose. Still, there was nothing that resembled a means to escape.

Mikhail’s heart rate increased with each pulse of the spacecraft’s alarm. The countdown ticker had been down a quarter when they’d left the bridge. It had to be past the halfway point now. “Come on!” he shouted, slamming his palm against a metallic door frame as yet another fruitless room revealed itself. Nina echoed similar frustration.

Reaching another intersection, Mikhail found himself having to choose between two directions. Off toward the ship’s starboard, or angled back toward the aft section. Without hesitation, he bolted toward the aft section, Nina hot on his heels. It took barely ten steps before he found something, unmistakable even amid the pulsing red warning lights. It was exactly the kind of clue he was hoping to find.

A blood trail. Thin, purple blood. Not human.

“Mikhail, look,” Nina said, pointing to the trail in the same moment he saw it.

Look, indeed.
The trail led from one of the side doors straight down the hall toward the back of the ship. The entity had been injured—that much Mikhail had sensed already. It was crawling toward its escape. That this trail looked suspiciously like something crawling on the floor had to be more than coincidence. “Let’s go,” he said, sprinting down the corridor.

The blood trail continued down the center of the hall until finally turning inside a room with an opened door. More than ever, Mikhail was positive this was where they needed to go. His legs moved faster. “It is in there!” He knew it. “Be ready for—”

Anything.

Skidding to a halt a few meters from their destination, Mikhail and Nina’s stares locked onto the door’s opening. Bright, rotating white lights flashed from within the room. A low rumble emanated into the halls. It lasted several seconds before the red pulsing of the warning lights once again became the only illumination.

What was that?
His pace picking up and his alien rifle awkwardly lifted to his shoulder, Mikhail reached the open door at a full-on sprint. Whirling into the room, he scanned it for a target. There was none to be found.

Inside the room was a row of metallic capsules, their fronts opened like segmented doorways, their interiors hollow except for a feature that was completely recognizable. Seats. Each capsule had one—a pristine, white, seemingly cushioned seat. Designed for something similar to, but not quite, human. Above each capsule was a large, circular opening.

Following the blood trail, Mikhail realized it led straight to where one of the capsules surely would have stood, but was now missing.
It escaped.
His focus shifted to Nina and himself. “Get in one of those capsules, quickly!”

Nina rushed toward the nearest one, abandoning her weapons as she leapt into the seat. Placing her arms on the armrests, she looked in every direction. Nothing happened. Eyes panicked, she turned to Mikhail. “What do we do?”

Hands on his head, Mikhail hurried to Nina’s capsule. There were controls within, but nothing looked familiar. How were these things activated? “Is there a button? A lever, something obvious?”

Nina’s hands raced, hitting every button and pressing in every indentation within reach. Again, nothing. Finally, her eyes came to rest on a single button separated from the rest—right along the inner wall of the capsule. The moment she slammed it in, the capsule came to life. The walls shifted and slid, prompting Mikhail to leap back to avoid being sliced in two. Within seconds, Nina was contained in a perfect metallic sphere. The only features on its surface were a transparent slit through which the sniper was peering out, and a ring around the middle of the sphere, complete with glowing lights. Slowly, the ring began to spin.

It was exactly what they had seen from the hallway—they must have only been moments behind the escaping being. Now knowing what to do, Mikhail needed only to claim a capsule for himself. Whatever these capsules were and wherever they were going, it was better than where they were now. With Nina taken care of, Mikhail offered the sniper a thumbs up from outside the window.

Suddenly, Nina’s eyes widened. Banging on the window, she shouted at the top of her lungs, pointing for Mikhail to turn around. The moment he did, he saw why she was screaming.

It was a guardian. The massive green robot was lumbering around the door, red rifle in hand. The moment Mikhail came into view, it raised its weapon and fired.

Mikhail was already in mid-leap. Landing sideways on his shoulder, he yowled as the guardian stepped toward him. Behind them both, Nina’s capsule soared upward through the hole in the ceiling. But Mikhail didn’t have time to care. Rolling along the floor to avoid another blast, he righted himself against the wall and raised his own alien weapon. The guardian and he fired simultaneously.

A searing pain struck Mikhail. It hit harder than the shot to his shoulder—burned more than the time he’d broken his leg jumping from the roof of his house as a teenager. The robot’s weapon had struck him on the left side of his hip; he could feel the middle of his torso burning. Through screams of torment, he fired at the robot again. His first shot had struck the guardian, knocking it backward. The second finished the job. The robot crashed against the floor with a metallic thud. Mikhail dropped his weapon, leaned his head back, and screamed at the top of his lungs.