An insistent beeping jogged Lori´s mind and she came back to her senses: her oxygen was running low.
Opening her eyes, she saw that the light had softened to a gentler crimson hue which allowed her to truly focus on the spaceship´s bizarre design. Looking nothing like the smooth, metal exterior of the saucer, the insides of the ship seemed to be made of living matter, creating the unsettling impression that they´d been swallowed by a terrible creature.
Beneath her, a spongy yet porous floor stretched out in a mosaic of rubbery slabs that all converged towards a wrinkled depression in their middle.
“Guys, I´m losing him!” Quentin called out, as he squatted above Matvey´s frostbitten form.
Pushing Sander´s leg off her, Lori sat up and crawled over to help, scanning the little domed area they now found themselves in for any trace of 2112.
In so doing, she discovered that veiny, chitinous membranes lined the circumference of their room with spiny, curved ridges that meshed above their heads in an interwoven tapestry of knobby protrusions, almost reminiscent of a mangrove tree.
Noting that Quentin had removed his helmet, she did the same… and regretted it almost instantly, as the warm air was heavy and humid, with a bitter, antiseptic tinge to it.
“Ugh…” she coughed. “Is- he OK?”
“I don´t know…” Quentin admitted. “I can´t fund a pulse.”
A yelp from behind her spun Lori around, and she saw her family tending to Barney, whose head had become badly swollen with blisters.
“Dad?” Lori teared up, temporarily forgetting about Matvey at the sight of her father´s distorted face.
She hurried back to his side, and helped Evelyn detach her father´s visor from its half-melted collar strap.
“I´m… OK…” he tried to smile, unable to open his eyes.
But he didn´t look it, with burns streaking up his jaw to a sizzled patch of what was once his hairline… Ignoring her own injuries, Evelyn wiped the blood from her nose and called out to the empty ship.
“Hey! Where are you?” she called out. “We need help!”
“Did we get away?” Barney asked feebly, from her arms.
As she looked back to her injured husband, Evelyn realized she didn´t even know where they were…
“I believe so. Our launch must have destroyed the hangar,” 2112 spoke, surprising everyone by rising up from the floor´s central ventricle as it stretched around his body to expel him. “Although I apologize for the danger, I had not anticipated such resistance upon our arrival.”
“Just help him!” Sander yelled back, losing his cool after witnessing so much violence.
Limping over, 2112 crossed the cockpit and went to one of the fibrous wall-panels to press his palms into the hard, fleshy substance. With a shiver, the partition started to sink into its own footprint, slowly disappearing below them… and revealed a liquid-filled tank, housing another gray clone.
“These dormant replicas confuse me…” 2112 said flatly. “Protocol dictates activation before travel.”
Kneeling before the container, he then reached down and released it´s fluid by unscrewing a valve. As the spray arced into the ground, 2112 caught some of the stream in mid-air and began rubbing Barney´s injuries.
“This will sooth the burns.”
“What the hell is that?” worried Evelyn, watching the inert little body beside them slump to the bottom of its receptacle, no longer suspended by the amber substance.
“Wait- What´s going on?” Barney asked, unable to see what they were talking about.
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But the twins kept him seated and tried to calm their father´s agitation as best they could.
“It is a combination of essential minerals and vitamins,” he reassured the family, coaxing them into applying the strange juice to Barney´s face.
2112 then removed a grate and let the cloned corpse squelch down into the ship´s entrails, before lifting the glass partition and turning to Quentin.
“Is he alive?”
Taking a moment before answering, Quentin stopped hovering over Matvey and plopped back down to squat on his haunches.
“What does it look like?” he snapped, followed by a long exhale.
2112 went over and touched the motionless man´s neck for a few long seconds…
“His vitals are undetectable…” the little man concluded. “But if he has simply gone into shock, we can try to stabilize him.”
“How?”
2112 looked back to the Schwabs as they continued to plaster Barney´s exposed skin with the quickly coagulating liquid before the tank´s spray abated… and pointed to the vacant clone-tube.
“I will refill the unit. We will submerge him until the neck… uh…”
“Are you OK?”
Hit by a wave of painful fatigue, their diminutive pilot shook off his dizziness and went to stand next to the sphincter-like trap door. Reaching up, he brushed against some of the lower-hanging filaments that dangled from the roof, which lit up in response to his touch,and instead of the dreary pink glow that radiated through the walls of the craft, these tendrils shone bright with a yellow incandescence, which somehow sent a signal to refill the stasis-pod with a smelly mist.
“God, why is it so bad…” retched Sander, unable to hold back his disgust as the secretions began to once again pool in the receptacle.
“He doesn´t care, Sander. They didn´t give him a nose,” his sister reminded him, blowing his already exhausted mind with her pertinent observation.
“Move him inside, before it is too full,” 2112 instructed, breaking Sander´s train of thought by enlisting him and Quentin to drag the large-bodied Russian. But by the time they´d finally fit him inside the wall, 2112 had reached his physical limit and collapsed.
“Bath…” he murmured, as Lori rushed to his side.
“Yeah, of course… Um- Hang on.”
Unsure of how to access the other tanks, she scooped him up by his armpits and leaned him against one of the other panels until it opened, before trotting back to the suspended feelers.
Evelyn joined her daughter before her arms gave out, careful not to step on the ringed portal by their feet, and helped hold 2112 up to the strangely sentient controls. Again he manipulated the ship, while Quentin and Sander busied themselves with the unenvious task of expelling the aborted clone… and soon, 2112 was back beneath a freshly-brewed batch of putrid ambrosia, twitching his way to a dreamy recovery.
“Wait, how do we-” Evelyn remembered her question, just before they closed the lid… but the moment passed, and she gave up. “Ah, whatever…”
She turned back around to face their odd new home and sat down with a sigh.
“What did you want to ask?”
Looking over to Quentin as her children resumed their care for Barney, she hesitated to say… and then realized she was well past caring:
“Bathroom…” she muttered.
“Oh...” he paused, after meeting her tired gaze. “Well… the way 2112 was spraying that juice, I´m guessing there´s some form of hormonal tract under here,” he tapped his foot on the rosy slab beneath him, “because it filtered right back down… Or we´d be standing in a puddle.”
“I´m not going through that weird butt-hole door,” Mieke answered curtly, having started nursing her child at the opposite end of the room.
“Yeah, I feel you... But I´m saying, you might have to pick a spot.”
Slowly understanding what he was getting at, Evelyn gave Quentin a disgusted frown… And so their stay began.
After going through the meager supplies that they´d managed to bring aboard, the Schwabs finished taking off their suits and dug into a meal of dehydrated apricots and shattered power-bars, while Quentin attempted a quick calculation, curious to know how long their rations would feed them.
“I´m good, save it…” he declined, as Evelyn offered him some. “We might be here for a while.”
“We better not…” she snorted sourly.
“I´m just saying, this is about a week´s worth of food,” he nodded to their cargo. “And there are seven of us… eight, if Matvey makes it.”
As he said it, he remembered Sergei, Pavel and the Coplands… and fell silent, as the raw emotion flooded into him. The Schwab family felt it too, and for the next few hours nobody said much, as they each did their best to process the grief.
Drying his eyes, Sander at one point tried telling a funny recollection about the men, but no one was really in the mood so he cut it short, reading the room. Eventually, Barney dozed off and Evelyn followed suit, spooning her extenuated husband on a nest made of discarded space suits.
While their parents slumbered, the twins watched Quentin circle the craft and inspect it from top to bottom, taking particular interest in a protuberance near the control-discs, that seemed related to the mysterious floor-ventricle…
But soon a rumble in his stomach calmed Quentin´s curiosity, and he resigned himself to a handful of dried fruit, unable to ignore his hunger any longer.
“Hey,.” Sander looked back to his sister, as she rearranged a shrink-wrapped loaf of tofu from their provisions into something that vaguely resembled a pillow. “You OK?”
Despite being the farthest thing from “OK”, Lori was nevertheless touched by his brotherly instincts, and reached out to hug him.
“Not really… I miss them. Even Revis…” she whispered with a sniffle. “They didn´t deserve that…”
“I know…” he lamented. “I know.”