II.

It was a tight fit, but Piety managed to pull herself through the hole in the hull. They would have to open it further to get the crew in, but that wouldn’t be as much of a problem as opening all the blast doors individually. Once inside, Piety turned on the flashlight mounted to her utility vest. She was in a hallway it seemed, and much to Piety’s surprise, at either end, the doors remained open. “It seems the lock-down didn’t extend to this part of the ship,” Piety announced to her radio.

“Re…peat… Losing… Signal…” Reverence replied through a wall of static.

Piety hissed and turned her radio off. Losing contact had been expected but was still vexing. She adjusted her goggles, doing her best to ignore the red flashing ‘Signal Lost’ in the corner of her view. “Left or right?” Piety asked herself before settling on right. She was near the center of the ship, so the bridge was probably in that direction. If she could make it there, she’d have the ability to unlock the whole ship if she wanted to – something that was near invaluable. If she controlled the bridge, she controlled who got what, when, and where. The Merchant Guild would be at her beck and call. It was a notion that excited her to no end. They would be untouchable.

At the end of the hall, Piety found herself at the start of another. Dark and shadowed, lit only by her flashlight, she couldn’t help but feel uneasy as she gazed down the length of the hallway. It was colder there than outside, sitting at a frigid fifteen degrees. She quietly hoped to herself that that meant she was near. But near what? Was she prepared to take on a demon? Piety drew a pistol from the holster on her belt. Would it be enough? Demons were just another fact of life in the world after the apocalypse. Some were nothing more than nuisances, imps that were more likely to play tricks on you than harm you. Then there were others, greater demons whose whims were far more monstrous. Those were the demons the Cult of Yaldabaoth dealt in: demons who warped and corrupted the world around them, demons who could enslave the minds and bodies of man, whose voracious appetites consumed whole villages.

Curiosity quickly outweighed caution. She would just be careful, she told herself as she walked down the hallway, dreaming of all the good things to come, of a life free from fear. She wasn’t going to let fear stop her now, not when that life was nearly within her grasp. This hallway wasn’t just an empty stretch but had doors on either side every twenty or so feet. Piety stopped at one and tried to force it. Like the hallway blast-doors, these ones remained unpressurized, sliding open sluggishly at her touch.

She didn’t know what she had expected to find within, but a homely apartment wasn’t it. “People lived here…” Piety said to herself as she took a step inside. To her left was an in-wall shelf and a series of framed pictures to go with it. They showed humans, people without a hint of mutation to them, living their lives, happier than she ever saw anyone. Piety picked up one of the pictures. There was a woman and a man, arm in arm with a child between them. Behind their heads was a banner: Welcome First Seeds Generation Two.

Piety replaced the picture and looked around the room. The dressers’ drawers were left open, the closet too, as if someone had frantically dug through them without a care for tidying up. Piety looked to the kitchenette, to the bar dividing the room. There were still bowls on its surface, filled now with dust and the stain of food. They had been eating dinner when they were forced to leave in a hurry.

It was painting an all too familiar picture. In the early days of the apocalypse people tried to flee the planet, wait out the End of Days in orbit on any shuttle that could fly. Eventually supplies would run out or mechanical failure would force them back. It was just delaying the inevitable. Piety heard that people who fled to Mars and the other colonies didn’t fair any better. Or, if they did, they weren’t telling anyone. She guessed they didn’t want a bunch of mutated freaks showing up on their doorstep.

In the end, the ship was just another dead hulk, a ghost that had long since been abandoned to space and was just now succumbing to a decaying orbit. It had probably been home to humanities best, brightest, and richest until everything went to shit, and they had to abandon ship.

Piety left the room behind. There was probably some good salvage in each room, but checking each of them could wait. Forgotten knickknacks and familial trinkets weren’t what she was after. No, she had to get to the bridge. At the end of the hall, Piety found the lift. She pried the doors open easily enough and stepped inside. In the upper right corner in the back was what she was looking for – the emergency hatch.

The hatch popped open with a groan and a clang that echoed up through the shaft. Piety holstered her pistol and reached up gripping the lip. Pulling herself up she peeked over the edge, hoping to find a maintenance ladder. “Nice,” she thought audibly, spotting one. Piety pulled herself all the way up. It might not take her to the bridge, but it would get her deeper than anyone has gotten so far.

The climb between decks was slow and arduous as she stopped at each floor to scan the writing above the doors. The hall she started at had been ‘Habitat D’ if the proceeding levels had any order to them, going from C through A.

She was nearly halfway to the next deck when her radio burst to life, filling the empty shaft with the scratchy sound of static. “Piety…” a voice called out, nearly inaudible. “Piety…”

“Hello? Rev is that you?” she asked, pausing her ascent. “Must have found a signal… Rev, can you hear me?”

“Piety…” the voice uttered. “You’re going to die…”

“What was that, Rev?” Piety asked, taking the radio off her vest before raising it above her head. “Repeat. I can’t quite hear you.”

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The sound that came out of the radio next nearly spelt her doom. A horrific screech pierced through the static as the sound of screaming erupted in the shaft. Piety dropped her radio, startled, nearly losing her grip on the ladder as she fumbled to catch it. The ghastly wail continued for a moment longer before cutting off as abruptly as it had started.

Reaffirming her grip and footing, Piety replaced her radio on her vest and seethed through clenched teeth. She could see her breath in a cloud before her, a cold reminder that there was a good chance she wasn’t alone. “Not Rev,” Piety said, pressing her forehead against a rung of the ladder as she composed herself.

Piety was no stranger to demons. When scouring the wastes and ruins of the world, you couldn’t be. Those who were, they didn’t live long. She must have crossed into its weird-field, the bubble of effect that surrounds demonic entities of greater caliber. Whether it was psychic energy or some kind of magic, it wasn’t known, but the high strangeness of its effects was well documented. People would hear things, see things, become entranced, or even succumb to fear induced madness within the field.

Focus was key. A weak mind made itself a target. Piety had to concentrate, focus on what she was there to do. She was close, she could feel it! And not just to the demon, but to the bridge, to her goal, to the freedom it promised. She was so close. Reverence would be furious, but she decided to press on. Piety wasn’t about to turn tail and run, to return empty handed.

Rung after rung she climbed until she reached a door marked BD-1. “Bridge Deck one?” Piety wondered out loud. Could it really be that easy? The ship was massive and probably had its own tram system to get to either end. Would her goal be so easily reached as to climb a few stories in an elevator shaft? Stranger things have happened, she told herself as she set out to pry the door open. The whole job reeked of too-good-to-be-true energy, why stop there?

The doors parted with a hiss as frigid air spilled out into the shaft, and along with it a miasmic stench. It was an assault of the senses, making Piety choke and gag. She was close alright, close to the demon’s den. Cautiously covering her mouth and nose, Piety looked through the parted doors. It was open air. What used to be part of a hallway had been torn open like a tin can.

Piety pulled herself up and through the doors. She was somewhere near the top of the ship. With a shiver she stepped forward, drawing her pistol. It was colder here than anywhere. There was no doubt in her mind that she would run into the demon soon.

Every fiber of reason warned her from going forward, warned her to stay back, wait for Reverence to assemble the rest of the crew. But something pulled her forward, tugging on her like the knotted end of a rope. There was something here, and she was meant to find it, she just knew it. It was almost warm that feeling of destiny, enough that the cold didn’t bother her as she started down the hallway.

The moon, now a shattered reflection of its former glory, was high in the sky, illuminating the ruined hallway in an eerie light. Piety found herself holding her breath as she inched her way down the path before her. She knew going forward was a bad idea, but she took those tender steps anyways, moving almost in a trance. When she made it to the end of the hall she let her breath loose with a mouthed curse.

There was a doorway, jammed ajar by a thick meaty substance that grew across it like moss on a log. Piety prodded it cautiously with the barrel of her pistol. The growth tensed in reply – it was alive! “What the hell?” Piety uttered softly. Was this the demon? Piety shone her flashlight through the door. The substance was everywhere, spreading out like roots across the wall and ceiling.

Going forward was a really bad idea, she told herself. Whatever this stuff was, it was connected to the demon somehow. She stepped forward anyways, cursing herself as she did so. “This is it, Piety,” she uttered as she stepped through the door, “this is how you die.”

Piety gingerly stepped over the growth of biomass and into the hall. She held her pistol at the ready as she crept forward, and as she did, the hall began to change, transforming from one of bolted metal sheets to one of stone brick. “The fuck…?” She uttered, sliding a hand across the cold stone. A distant cry drew her attention. It sounded like a woman. Were there survivors after all?

The stone hallway seemed to stretch on and on with her never nearing the shadowed end. Piety’s flashlight flickered as another cry echoed up from beyond. “Help me…” a voice whispered in her ear, causing her to spin on her heels to face it. There was no one there, only darkness. But when she turned back around, she found herself at the end of the hall, standing before a stone archway. On either side were torches, whose flames danced wildly in the darkness, casting the hall in a twilit hue. Another scream pierced the air. It was close now, just beyond the archway.

Piety came into a large chamber made of the same dour stone as the hallway. Massive pillars supported a heavy dome roof. At the peak was a hole that let in a seemingly solid beam of moonlight that was cast over an altar at the center. Upon the altar was a woman, heavy with child, strapped down at her wrists and ankles. “Help me…” the voice whispered again, this time from seemingly nowhere and everywhere at once, as if the words were being transmitted directly into her mind. “Please… Help me… Please, before they return…”

Piety wanted to help, but for some reason she stood frozen on the spot, staring wide-eyed across the room. The whole scene felt wrong, as if she were watching a memory play out instead of real life. From either side of the room shadowy figures appeared, funneling out of the darkness one by one until they surrounded the woman on all sides. Piety watched in horror as one in the center drew forth a long curved knife.

Some brave part of Piety wanted to call out to them, to fire a round in the air and demand that they stop. However, the words caught in her throat and her arms hung limp at her sides. All she could do was watch in terror as the blade was brought high and then to a sudden fatal low. The sound the woman then made as they carved into her would haunt Piety until the end of her days. “With the seed of Saklas sowed in the lea of man,” the center figure bellowed, “we give rise to the Yalda Bahut, the Child of Chaos!” The figure raised the dagger again before bringing it down across the woman’s belly. This Piety couldn’t watch. She shut her eyes and didn’t open them again until another cry rang out. It was the cry of an infant.

When Piety opened her eyes again, the room was empty, the cultists gone seemingly back to the shadows from which they came. The body was gone too, and in its place upon the altar was a lamb. It was a strange creature unlike anything Piety had seen before. It was as white as a cloud, a stark contrast to the bloodstained stone upon which it rested. With a head of seven horns and seven eyes, it watched her from across the room. Its eyes were entrancing, shimmering black stones that seemed to have trapped entire galaxies within them. “Be not afraid,” a voice boomed like thunder, “Marked One.”

As the words met her ears, a strange warmth flooded her body, from the top of her head to the tips of her toes. For some reason, she wasn’t afraid, not of the lamb, not of the feeling it invoked. Piety took a few staggered steps forward as if reeled in by the voice. “Help me…” said a whisper in the back of her mind. “Help me…”

“H-how?” Piety stammered.

“Wake up…” said the voice. “Wake up!”