I laid on the ground trying to keep my nausea in check. The ship was still shaking even minutes after I had first begun to lie down.

“Is it alwa- always this bad?” I managed to sputter.

“No-” The insectoid was interrupted by the sound of metal on metal as something heavy fell over, “-Usually the shakes are weak enough that I can keep eating. Did something fall? Everything should be bolted down-”

I laid on all fours trying not to heave my stomach up. The vibrations were getting worse, no longer was it a simple turbulence but a feeling akin to if a child had seized me up and swung me around like a toy. The entire ship was creaking, sheets of metal screamed as it folded against the metal bolts holding it in place. Another machine was flung onto its side and I felt myself being lifted.

Gretch wrapped a paw around me and shoved me under one of the workbenches before slamming the shutter down. I was lost to the nausea and darkness, shaking, trembling. I felt bile begin to rise and began gagging, spitting up the scant bites of food and water I had managed to down all over myself.

Then all at once as if it never happened the shaking stopped. The world became still again and I was left to collect myself.

I ripped my helmet off and breathed for a moment, leaning against the interior of the small armored shelter I found myself in. After I collected myself I wiped at my face, trying to clear off what I could. The helmet had not magically cleared the vomit away and I was stuck using my suited up arm to wipe chunks off.

“Hello? Can someone grab me a towel or something?”

I continued my work for a few minutes before I felt I was cleared off enough to open my eyes. I felt around the small box I was now in until one of the walls shifted slightly.

This was the shutter they pulled down, why I was trapped in here.

I moved my hands along the bottom searching for some kind of latch or release lever then tugged at the shape I felt on the ground.

It didn’t move. I vaguely understood that to get out I needed to pull on some sort of latch. I tried yanking it sideways and when that didn’t work I rose to a knee, put both hands on the lever and pulled with all the strength I had.

The bar wouldn’t budge.

“Hello?” I hammered on the metal sheet with my fist, “Hello! Can someone get me out of here?”

I rolled onto my side and kicked the metal bar.

“Uh-” I tried to keep the panic out of my voice, “I think I’m stuck. Can someone get me out or-” I grunted again as I slammed my full weight into the latch.

“Calm down human, I can see the issue.” I heard Gretch’s thick growl as the spoken language outpaced the monotone translator. “The metal here is rusted and must have locked up.”

I heard the irvole grab the shutter’s handle on the outside and begin pulling, but the metal did not even creak in defiance. It was made to survive industrial accidents, even panicked as I was, I still knew you couldn’t pull it apart with your hands.

“Okay. So get me out now.” I decided. “Use power tools or something.”

“The breaker went off, I need to check on that first and get the lights on. Then I can see about cutting that open.”

I felt my heart drop, “Why are the lights off- You’re gonna leave me?”

I heard the irvole’s footsteps pause long enough to reply, “Just a few minutes human, something tripped the breaker and I worry some of the machines may have damaged their power cords. We may have some risk of fire or electrocution. Please wait there where it is safe until we can assess the damages.”

I had thought it was dark because I was trapped under a few inches of sheet metal, but now it appeared that it was dark because the power went out.

Shaking like this is not normal, something was wrong with this ship.

The thought came unbidden along with a weight in the pit of my stomach. I had no words to describe how wrong everything felt. Beyond claustrophobia or my dislike of this ship or the sudden hardware failures.

I hadn’t seen a spec of rust since I ended up on this ship. Then suddenly we find one thing rusted and it just so happens to trap me in here?

This is clearly paranoia, surely the aliens have oversights as well. I needed to stop flying into a panic every time something bad happened. That night on the table was a hallucination.

No matter what I told myself, I knew in my heart I was being watched at this moment. This ship was wrong. The air tasted wrong. I felt the prickling of hairs on the back of my neck and I knew I was being watched.

“One rusted lock is easy enough to explain,” I tried to tell myself. “They will fix the lights and then get me out of here.”

“You shouldn’t leave John. It isn’t safe out there.”

I leapt up and slammed my head into the top of my prison. Wincing I leaned back down and cradled my head.

“Hello? Who is this?”

After a long pause in the dark the voice once again responded.

“It’s me, John.”

I recognized that voice. It wasn’t the monotone of a translator nor the rapid humming speech of the insectoid. No it was female, human. The language was somewhat nasal, reminiscent of a French accent.

The person this voice belonged to spoke French.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

“Diane? Diane is that you? They took you didn’t they?”

“They did John. But you need to listen to me.”

I felt tears starting to form. “Where have you been? I thought they cut you up and-”

“John. You need to listen.” She interrupted me, her tone was serious. Her voice was exasperated and tired.

I felt fury raising within me, angry tears began to stream down my face. “No- No! You listen to me! I thought you were dead. I thought I was alone and- and-” a sob pushed its way up my throat. “Where were you? Did anyone else make it?”

Her voice paused for a moment, “No, John. I am sorry you were left behind. No one else made it.”

My mouth went dry as I struggled with the lump in my throat. For a moment I had dared hope that they had survived too. That we had escaped the table and saws together.

Her voice carried on once more, “John, you need to listen. You are in danger.”

“From what? Are-” Were the aliens planning on something with me?

“Something is coming for you John. It carved its name into your chest. It knows where you are.”

“Those were- That was a hallucination! It was the starvation and pain that- No it wasn’t-” It couldn’t be real. Everyone assured me that it wasn’t a demon, it was an alien special ops or a hired assassin or-

“You saw it John, now it can see you. It carved its name into you John. Its name.”

I felt my breathing near hyperventilation. “What does that mean?”

“Its name is on you John. It wrote its name on you-” It’s voice grew louder, no longer was it a quiet conversation but a panicked shriek. “You are labeled, John and everything can see its name on you. It carved its name onto your flesh and now you have its name-”

I tried to cover my ears, my gloves were too thick and uneven to properly seal the sound out. I shook my head trying to not hear what it was saying and then a realization struck me.

“No. No. No. No. Nononono.”

The voice wasn’t coming from outside of the metallic shutter, whatever was talking was stuck in this small metal shelter with me.

I froze as my blood ran cold. I turned to face the impenetrable darkness beside me.

“What do you want?” I cried out.

It again paused for a moment, as if unsure of itself. “You must survive John. You are deemed important. It is coming after you and you must not let it touch you.”

I felt my heart hammering in my chest and I struggled to control my breathing. Even so I swallowed and tried to gain information.

“Why am I important?”

After a long pause I heard Diane’s voice again, “You were chosen.”

“Why was I chosen?” My voice creaked as I struggled to form words.

“You are the one that’s left.” It struggled to find words, slowly choosing each one with care. “You are chosen because it wants to harm you. You are hunted, and therefore you are the chosen and must escape to fulfill your duties.”

I panted, listening for more but heard nothing. An eerie silence dominated our shared space. Why was the sound of my breathing the only breathing I heard?

I swallowed. “How do I escape? You said that thing is out there? I can’t hide here forever.”

“Soon we will leave you. But not forever. Fear it most during the crossings. The rules have changed because you are chosen, but the rules are not broken.”

“What is that supposed to mean? You aren’t making sense? Who chose me? What is hunting me? How do I stop it? What are my duties?”

This brought the dark thing to silence once again.

But before it could speak light began streaming from beneath the metal shutters. They had fixed the lights, I turned and froze in pure terror.

From the little that passed through the bottom of the shutter trapping me inside I saw what was left of Diane. Her chest had been carved open and her bones and organs had been removed, leaving an empty crevasse in the woman’s carcass. Even now clamps held her frosted skin and muscles back to allow for easy access into the abdomen, her spine was visible from the front of her stomach and her eyes laid open, staring at me.

Her lips began to move, “A kiss is binding, John. Beware the thirteen fingered man.”

I screamed.

~

I moved a tendril over an incident report. Like all important things it was delivered to me via paper. Anything that meant anything had to be hard backed in case of computer failure, or hacking or… anything really. Computers were finicky at the best of times.

For instance, the human’s hazard suit had a camera in it that could handily document everything he saw. Obviously if you have something as helpful for an investigation as that it meant that the creature wearing it would ejaculate half a litre of acidic fluid directly into it and then leave it half broken and facing the wrong way.

Now I had been tasked by my boss to figure out if the incident was retaliatory or some kind of twisted joke.

I had to do this with absolutely zero reliable witnesses, recorded evidence or electronic assistance.

I massaged one of my limbs, the neurons within were practically cooking on the level of thought going into what was essentially a recursive loop. Someone jammed the lock shut on one of the industrial accident safety shelters. Someone tripped the breaker and forced the two managers out of the room to investigate. Then someone placed the dissected frozen corpse of one of the human’s friends into the small box with them.

So I checked the video feed, which was still capturing nothing but a wall and half of the human’s ass. Then I checked the logs from the other parts of the ship. At the time of the incident no one was missing from their posts and no groups reported anyone not accounted for. After an emergency like this which caused threat to life and limb occurred, personnel counts were taken very seriously to ensure that no one was trapped under rubble or being electrocuted.

Or at least that was what you told the slaves, it was actually to make sure no one stowed away anywhere.

Then I checked the witness report, which was a singular report where an Earth primate explained that directly after hitting his head the corpse across from him started yelling that there were ghosts and demons on this ship.

I rubbed at a few of my limbs’ neuron lumps again, reading the human’s opinions felt like a slow aneurysm.

The ship is haunted, evil spirits, the dead are talking to me, they are in the vents.

It was all looney superstitious nonsense.

When I got down to it I knew three things:

The first thing I knew was that someone had purposefully rusted one of the latches in the emergency shelters shut. I knew this because it was the only thing that displayed any rust in the entire warehouse that was made of corrosion resistant metal.

The second thing I knew was that whoever it was had been close enough at the time to flip the breaker, in other words someone within the same workspace. I could narrow this down to likely someone within that industrial block.

Finally the third thing I knew was that the human’s helmet was unsatisfactory. My boss was going to yell at me if they learned we had not accounted for the alien’s acidic projectile attack which the human could perform when it got stressed out. I was currently theorizing that it was meant to blind something larger than it if it got grappled and jostled around too harshly.

Overall my solution to the problem was twofold, to search for missing chemicals capable of oxidizing the metal along with traces of whoever had taken them and to order my subordinates to rework the helmet.

My goal visualized, I decided to perform the second action via sternly worded electronic-mail because I thought meetings were annoying and I had things to do.

~

“A new helmet design… Accounting for a projectile acidic attack?”

Gretch thought he read it wrong, then discovered that he had been correct the first time.

He was vaguely sure that humans didn’t do that. No, the acid was clearly much too weak to be a threat to anything and had chunks of half digested food in it. He had grabbed the human pretty roughly when he saw the machines falling over and had just figured the human had gotten the lunch squeezed out of him.

“When does the alien get back? Are they doing medical checkups on him or…”

The insectoid took another bite of nutrient paste, then scratched their neck. “I was told that he didn’t have any actual damage, but they did lock him in his room because he was freaking out.”

Gretch grunted. “Either way, we do need to work on some sort of… suction system? Humans are so moist all of the time. Did you see his shirt after he got out of the suit? It looked like he showered in it.”

“Hm, how dry do we keep him? Will removing all moisture make him ill?”

Gretch was at an impasse, how was he supposed to know? The human was clearly descended from some kind of slug or something, so surely removing all of the slime from him was bad.

“We should focus on making sure he doesn’t drown in his own stomach contents if he gets hit in the stomach again. Then bother him about the skin-slime later.”

The insectoid nodded, “There is knowledge in that statement- Yes that would be smart. What are your plans?”

“It would be easiest to put a little pump that will remove liquid if it goes beyond a certain point, put a filter in front of it to prevent it from getting clogged with stomach-clumps.” Gretch began piecing it together in his mind. “But I do not like how complex the helmet is becoming, machinery with small moving parts are fragile and break down easily. No one wants a helmet that breaks easily. That is not why helmets exist.”

“I agree, maybe make it on activation? Make it so that he can pull up the faceplate to drain it?”

“But then if he vomits in a situation where he needs the helmet?”

“Maybe include a pouch that fits into the chest cavity, store the fluid for later where it can be emptied and include a sensor in the chest to prevent it from flowing back up.”

Gretch nodded, the plan was starting to come together.

He was an engineer at heart.