“What happened?”
“When we were running up the pillar, one of those fire bolts zipped between our legs, it left a nasty hole in the panelling and then gravity stopped going sideways. I grabbed a guard rail before I slipped, you on the other hand started tumbling arse over kettle, you would've ended up as a nasty splatter if I didn't catch you by the ankle. Then the pillar started working again, and your head slammed into it hard. Hence, the” – Paul pointed to the bloodied bandage wrapped around Thomas’s head – “well, you know.”
“Fair enough, I suppose,” Thomas sighed, smacking his lips.
The tapping of boots against metal echoed down the corridor. Lines of glass spheres mounted to the ceiling emitted pale white light, shining down upon the riveted walls and floor. Slowly, the surviving members of the Orhill party wandered through the twisting internals of what Paul kept insisting was a ship. Thomas thought the ship felt more like the insides of an animal. The hallways buckled side to side like the joints of crooked fingers. Through the gaps between the panels, a leathery membrane pulsed, expanding and contracting with wheezy inhales and exhales.
Rooms branched off at random intervals. Many were cuboid and stuffed with crates. Others were misshapen spheres, multiple corridors growing into it at random angles like veins connecting to a tumour, several of the doorways were only accessible to something that could climb the walls like a spider.
The group wordlessly followed in Paul's footsteps. The march was erratic. Every moment was a coin toss between stuffing themselves into a random closet or turning on their heels and walking back the way they came. The party had circled back to one of the mangled junctions so many times, the only door they hadn’t already tried to climb through was the one on the very top of the ceiling.
“Paul,” said Thomas, “Do you know where you’re going?”
A whiney voice piped up from the back, “Yeah Paul, where do you think you’re taking –”
“Was I talking to you?” Thomas snapped, whoever spoke didn't want to make themselves known, and quickly quieted down. A few murmurs rippled among the crowd as he turned his attention back to Paul.
“Of course, I do,” Paul stated, as if the answer was obvious, “the worm in my brain tells me where we need to go.”
There was a long pause.
“Pardon me?”
Paul’s face went flushed with embarrassment, “Oh, of course, that doesn’t mean anything to the rest of you. Sorry,” he took a deep breath as he organized his thoughts, tapping the small wound on the side of his head, “When that thing dug into my head everything went dark, I couldn’t see, couldn’t move and the only thing I could hear was this voice. But it wasn’t a voice, more like a loud idea, this feeling that someone wanted me to stop thinking and do what it wanted me to do. It went louder and louder and then stopped, like it screamed for too long and wore out its voice. That's when I woke up, burnt the wasp and legged it out of there.”
Paul huffed as he dragged a metal desk, using it as a step to reach one of the high doors in the room they all followed him into. Thomas and the party drag themselves up after him.
“When we dragged you, Thomas, to the door at the top of the pillar after you smacked your head, that mob of freaks nearly caught up to us. Even if we didn’t have to drag you, there was no way we were getting away. We were all panicking and making peace with God. Then I heard the door talk in my head, mumbling something about needing grease for its joints. No idea why, but I asked it if it could close. Then wham!” – the youth clapped his hands together – “there was a thick wall of steel between us and them.”
Thomas tilted his head and cocked an eyebrow, “how?”
“The worm in my head. The wasps use them to make things into slaves, to do whatever they want them to do. Before they can turn them into versions that are designed to be controlled, like the frogs and the monkey maggot spider. I don’t know why, but it doesn’t seem to work on people. I heard them talk about our brains being difficult to adapt to, they thought they finally did, but thankfully they didn’t.”
The last man to climb up the desk sputtered as he pulled himself onto the ledge, “What do you mean, hear them?”
“The worms don’t only control people, it also lets them control and talk to the things the wasps make, the doors of the ship, those carts with the legs, it's done to make whatever they enslave better at doing work for them. The wasps use special ones without the enslavement function to make their lives easier, they can talk to anything with a worm, just by thinking what they want to say and to whom. I’ve been using it to eavesdrop on them and keep an eye out for anything that might be getting too close to us.”
“Explains the constant doubling back, pretty clever, Paul,” Thomas grinned, he never thought that anyone in Orhill had a knack for survival like him and Flanigan. Even less for the twins.
“I Wish I could do more; I’m already pushing the boundaries of what I can do without drawing attention. After I closed the door, it felt like my head was going to explode, probably the wasps trying to kill the worm. They think it worked; I don’t want to let them know I'm still rooted in.”
“Do you know what the Wasps are?” Junior asked as he sheepishly shuffled towards him, “what do they want?”
Paul sighed, rubbing his head, “The information is jumbled, doesn’t help either that I can only understand their concepts if there's an equivalent I already know of.”
Thomas placed a hand on Paul's shoulder, “Can you try?” The young boy shrugged before weakly nodding.
"The earth is not the centre of God’s creation, there is no centre. It looks like an endless sea with balls floating in the waves. The balls are islands. On one of these islands lived the wasps. They lived like us and had more nations, creeds and languages than I could count. They crafted things I can’t even describe, it looked like paradise, but many of them weren’t happy with what they had and wanted more. There were many wars fought with horrible weapons, they make those silver eggs look like candles. Death” – he paused, catching his breath – “God, there was so much death. They killed each other, the forests, the seas, the mountains. They killed their world. The strongest of the survivors conquered the rest, forming the last empire their world would ever see. The empire created arks, ships like the one we are in now but even bigger. It took its fleet and sailed up into the sky, into the sea of creation, to find a new island to call home. They found many islands, some had life and even strange types of people, but none were like their homes. They set up port cities wherever they could and enslaved whatever they found. Whenever they found an island where they couldn’t build or conquer, they destroyed, turning entire worlds into slag that they could use to build more ships. Only God knows how long they have been doing this for. Recently, they discovered our island, the shooting star was this very ship, it's a rowboat that was sent down from their main ship to this world –”
“But why are they here?” demanded Junior, “are they going to conquer us? Destroy us?”
“No. The ship was sent here to study us. They think this island, this world, is just like their old home before they killed it. They want to settle.”
“Orhill? Dalfan?”
“Everywhere, everything.”
“By God” – the face of one of the group members went pale, his breathing growing fast and shallow – “oh dear God.” A few began to weep, others began to argue, Junior did his best to calm the crowd. His pleas were ignored.
“What should we do?” Cried a voice.
“Should?” retorted another, “What can we do?”
“Bloody nothing, we and everything we know and love are already dead,” one of the former members of Rodrick’s gang began to bellow, doing his best to summon the energy of his dead leader, “If they are coming here to conquer and rule, I say the best thing any of us can do is submit and take whatever mercy they’ll give us.”
“Idiot,” Paul snarled.
“The hell you –”
“Do you know what they do to the people they get their hands on?” He asked rhetorically, his face turned a shade of cherry as his voice contorted into a rough stage shout, fear of drawing attention was the only thing keeping his volume down, “have any of you seen what they kept inside those huts?”
Thomas answered, “Body parts, cleaned, polished and organised.”
“And I know who they belonged to, how they got there, and why they were completely butchered. The wasps don’t see things as the thing they are, they don’t see a mountain as a mountain, a tree as a tree or a human as a human. Everything to them is just parts, components they can take apart and put back together however they want. That mincemeat, what used to be our countrymen, the wasps broke them down into scraps to understand what each bit did and how they could use them as spare parts. The numbers, properties, potential uses, experimental applications, the worm keeps telling me and I can’t turn it off.”
Rodrick’s remaining mob huddle together, their speaker readied a retort. Thomas could taste Rodrick’s ghost lingering in the air, “And what are we meant to do against that, then? You saw what they did to Rodrick –”
“And what the fuck was he doing?”
“Getting that egg thing off you and your stupid brother!”
Paul spat venom as he spoke, “I thought I could sell it, Jackson wanted to get rid of it. I wish that I had listened to him. But Rodrick, the first moment he got his hands on it, he started ranting about overthrowing the count and tried to get us all killed. We came here to save people, save our friends, our families. And the only thing he was thinking of since we got in this Godforsaken forest was overthrowing Junior and turning us into bandits, the thing we came here to stop. The stupid worm hasn’t told me how long they had been tracking us, but I am willing to bet top coin that your brave and selfless leader persuading us to beat each other to death was what got their attention. And now he is dead, my brother is dead, and we are fucked because of him!”
“Paul,” Junior muttered, trying to get his attention, his meek voice was drowned out beneath the tirade.
Thomas tried to interject, “Paul, you should keep your voice –”
Paul snapped at him, “Tommy, I don’t want to hear –”
“Paul, for fuck’s sake, shut up!” Junior barked, his voice sounded more like his father and struck with the same weight as Theo’s orders. His point made, his voice dropped back to a whisper, “Something is coming.”
Scuttling echoed towards them. Thin metal legs against the ship’s panelling, growing louder.
Paul furrowed his brow as he closed his eyes, a second passed before he snapped them wide open, “We need to move. Now.”
⁂
The youth raced through the hallways. Thomas and the rest ran close behind, keeping pace with their guide and putting distance between them and whatever was hot on their heels. He stumbled as he leapt through a side door, the crowd followed suit.
Thomas crawled under a desk, the rest found either a dark corner or shadow to squeeze into.
Clang.
Clang.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
Clang.
A harsh drum beat that grew louder and louder. Then, silence. Thomas froze like a startled deer, every fibre in his body was tensed tight. No one dared breathe.
No one but it.
The head of a giant monkey leaned into view; its face was the height of the doorway. It was one of the giant beasts that assaulted the group back in the clearing. Its legs had contorted into a more compact form, allowing it to rapidly crawl like an insect, one set planted firmly on the floor while the other pushed against the roof.
Bulbous black eyes stared blankly into nothing; its head followed the lead of flared nostrils as it sniffed the air like a bloodhound. Each moment it shuffled closer and closer. Thomas rapidly glanced about the room, familiarizing himself with the last thing he believed he’ll ever see.
A flash of movement caught his eye, Paul was waving his hand. With Thomas's attention bound firmly onto him, Paul pointed to his left hand and then to Thomas’s. He slowly reached out, Thomas repeated the motion, Paul grinned ear to ear and nodded, Thomas mentally breathed a sigh of relief. Paul reached his hand up, Thomas repeated the motion. Just as Paul led them through the bowels of the alien ship, Thomas let him instruct his movements. His hand was directed backwards, he felt his knuckles brush up against the handle of one of the desk’s drawers.
Thomas clenched his jaw and focused on slowly breathing through his nose, paranoid that his panicked heart was drawing the attention of the hellish maggot ape that was inching closer towards him.
He gripped the handle firmly, pulling the drawer open at a glacial pace. Paul mimed placing his hand into the drawer, Thomas copied with his own. All of his attention was on the boy in front of him now, half to follow his commands and the other to keep his focus off the beast. He could feel its breath against him now, fried garlic and cow shit blended into hot steam that condensed against his skin.
Following his gestures, Paul sent Thomas's hand backwards, then to the left, then backwards again, to the right, right again, no, he meant a left, a bit forward, then Paul nodded. With no time to think, Thomas gripped tightly and pulled the object out of the drawer in a single swift and silent motion. The obscured light from the doorway revealed the object to be a cube, dull translucent grey slime that held its shape, A grape sized orange snake eye twisted in the mass, locking its gaze with his.
Thomas couldn’t tell if it was an object or a living thing.
He didn’t want to know.
He glanced back to Paul; the boy mimed the sequence of squeezing the cube tight and throwing it over the beast and out the door. Thomas took one last long inhale and repeated the action. The slime cube flew, letting out a wet meaty squish as it collided with the wall behind the worm, then it let out what sounded like the yell of an elderly man as it skidded across the floor out of sight.
With enough force to snap bones like twigs, the abomination twisted its head back out the doorway. On that improvised cue, Paul closed his eyes and a distant doorway slammed shut with a harsh echo. The crowd could hear one of their own crying and begging for help, muffled from behind it.
With a blur of purple skin, it bolted towards the door. With a few gentle taps, the door opened for the beast, locking shut behind it as it raced through.
Everyone, Thomas included, breathed a long and heavy sigh of relief. Paul, however, held his head in his hand and braced himself against the wall. Thomas stared at him, unsure what was happening. A few moments passed before Paul released his grip.
“I wasn’t sure if me slamming the doors and playing sounds over the public hailer would have drawn their attention,” Paul stood up tall and stretched out his tight muscles. “I can’t describe how bad the headaches got when they last tried.”
Thomas huffed as he caught his breath, “How did you know what was in there.”
“They keep very detailed manifests, plus one of the wasps thought something was stealing its belongings, so it made a note in the brain worm library, so it remembered where it last left them. It was very clear that no one was to move its stress cube from its desk.”
“Stress cube?”
“Apparently, it's meant to help when you feel anxious. It purrs like a cat when you give it a gentle squeeze” – Paul turned his head towards the door – “absolutely hates being thrown, however.”
“How did that thing not see you?”
Paul stood up, leaning his hand against a panel with a spiral pattern covering it. With a few strokes from his fingers the doors slid closed, and the lights came on, “They lost their eyesight as they were being bred by the wasps, needs a master to tell it where to go and what to do. Can't easily tell where you are if you're quiet.”
The long room was a mess, A thin rectangle with several desks placed side by side, lining both walls on Thomas’s left and right.
Jars, boxes and waxed objects were littered about. He took one step after another, his hand brushing the desktops as he walked past.
A ship’s steering wheel caught his eye, he paused his stride to examine it. The object was dull grey, covered with knobs and switches, studded with dials and glass beads that flashed green and blue. It hummed like a beehive as Thomas squeezed it gently.
His thumb brushed over a button and a jar shot towards him before coming to a sudden stop in the middle of the air, a few inches in front of the decorated wheel. He took a step back and the jar followed him, he twisted the wheel side to side and back and forth, all the while the jar moved in kind to keep the same distance and position in front of it. He twisted a dial and a jet of pressurized air sprayed out the front, leaving a layer of frost where it hit the glass. Pressing another button, the jar began to spin in place as the wheel sprayed a layer of oil over the jar, it quickly hardened into a thin coating of white wax.
Thomas thought back to what he had seen, the sheep, the wolf, all the random objects, the eyes. “So that's how they do that,” he mumbled to himself.
“It helps preserve samples for long term storage,” Paul answered loudly, giving Thomas unasked for elaboration.
“Is there anything you don’t know?”
“I wish I knew less, sometimes If I don’t blurt something out it feels like my head will pop.”
A scoff filled the room, “If you’re so smart, then why don’t you use that brain worm to find us a way out of here.” A random survivor asked rhetorically.
Junior glared, despite his short and lean stature he loomed over the man, “We are not going to do any thinking about leaving, we came here to find the missing farmers, and we are certainly not leaving if any of our captured men are still alive.”
Another party member joined in, “oi, where are they anyway?”
“Sapient species examination and storage cells can be accessed by continuing forth through the specimen preparation lab,” Paul’s eyes glazed over, drool dripping from the corner of his mouth.
Thomas slowly blinked at Paul, everyone else cocked their heads in confusion. The boy jerked upright and rubbed life back into his face.
“Sorry, force of habit.”
Thomas notched an arrow as he walked side by side with Paul, ready to loose a shot at the first sign of danger as the boy led the group through the door at the end of the room on the left, then down the hallway and through the door on the right, then right again, straight, left, right, straight, Paul quietly muttered directions at every crossroad.
The boy was tired. His eyes looked sunken into his skull, locked forwards, aiming at the next turn. Thomas never thought he would miss the twins' constant arguing, taking the smallest issue and throwing it back and forth at each other endlessly. He couldn't remember a time when they weren't side by side. But now it was only Paul.
He only made the minimum of small talk when prompted, and though he made it clear that he still had the lungs for a screaming match, the fights weren't his normal banter, it looked like he was on the verge of tears any time he raised his voice.
In the quiet moments when he led the party forward through the twisting corridors, Paul reminded Thomas of himself.
The thought scared him. Paul didn’t deserve that.
“Entrance to the sapient species examination and storage cells are on the right,” Paul blurted out with a lifeless monotone, coming to a stop in front of a pair of doors. They looked identical to the rest they had come across, Thomas wondered if this confusion is what others in Orhill feel when they get lost in the Delmerk.
Sterile white light parted through the open doorway, cutting through the black and returning vision to the room. Now illuminated, Thomas saw the missing people writhing in front of him, raising bruised and bloodied arms over their faces to protect their eyes from the blinding glow. They were thin and weak, covered in oversized gowns, many of them had ripped edges as they were torn into bandages for their wounds. Scars and burn marks dotted their faces, some tried to conceal a missing hand or foot within the robes, others were too dazed and confused to bother.
“Bloody hell, never thought I’d be happy to see Tommy again.” Thomas turned to the side, bundled together in a corner were the missing half of the party. One of Rodrick’s friends flashed a grin of broken teeth, His left eye gleamed in the shadow, the other bruised and swollen shut. The pack were battered and worse for ware, but they still had the clothes they walked in with, and they were alive. God, Thomas never thought he would be happy to see anyone, especially them, alive.
Junior nearly tripped over himself as he ran to the front, grabbing onto the door frame to keep his balance. “You. Status. What happened to you all? How are the farmers?” he huffed like he ran a marathon.
“Ay, Junior. Never thought I would be happy to see you. Hope you don’t mind, but we were all taking bets on if you were –”
“Please answer the question. Are you okay?”
The man paused; the rest squinted at the boy. For a second, they all thought they confused a random man for their leader. “Roughed up a bit on the way in. But we all made it in alive” – he glanced back at the rest of the prisoners – “wish I could be as positive about the others. Lord knows what those demons did to them. And it isn't just our folks from Orhill, they nicked people from Thimble, Brallden, Greymarch on Row –”
“My mummy and I went down to Bridale for the festival, I wanted to see the fireworks,” said a small voice that spoke up from the crowd. A young girl, long blond hair framing hollow sickly pale cheeks, a thick wrapping of improvised bandages covered her left eye, she huddled within one of the party’s jackets.
Junior’s face twisted in confusion, “Bridale? But that's in Count Shinlin’s land.”
“They have been very busy,” responded Paul.
“Real bloody busy” said Rodrick’s friend, “the poor bastards here were prodded and tormented in ways I don’t want to know. And when they weren’t getting things stabbed into or bits cut off, those stupid frog men would run their own tests, seeing how bad they can hurt one of us before they got bored.” He tapped his lip, “Got this grin from them when I saw them eyeing the little girl. Those Freaks can kick like mules.”
Junior stepped forward towards the prisoners, “How many of you are able to walk?”
An elderly lady amongst them spoke, wide eyes peered out from a bush of white frizzy hair, Thomas could tell that the poor woman was still trying to figure out if what she saw was a dream or not, “Does that mean we’re finally leaving?”
“Oh, thank God it's over,” sighed a man that sat behind her, messaging his mutilated stump of a leg to ease the pain.
“A lot of them won’t be able to walk on their own,” Thomas pointed out, answering Junior’s question, “our options are limited, but with the people we have here we should be able to carry the wounded. Paul could probably help us find something we could fashion into crutches and stretchers.”
Rodrick’s friend scoffed, “you can’t be serious about making a break for it?”
Junior raised his hands in frustration, his eyebrows furled, “We don’t have time with arguments, we have found who we came here to save. We need to leave, now.”
“To where? Even if we make it out of” – Rodrick's friend glanced about – “whatever the hell this thing is, we are going to be a large group carrying injured moving across an open clearing. And knowing what happens when they're bored, I don’t want to know what happens when they're mad if they catch us.”
“The longer we stay here, the more likely they are to find us. We need to take the chance to run while we have it.”
“No, we need to have something to guarantee we won’t be dead meat the moment one of them finds us.”
Thomas stumbled forward, arms flailing towards the wall to steady himself as the floor suddenly hefted upwards. Junior threw himself at him for structural support, he was blinded with a pillow of the boy’s ginger curls as the mayorling nearly headbutted him in the process. The rest folded in onto each other. Paul, however, stood tall and unfazed; he knew that was going to happen. Thomas picked Junior up by the shoulders and straightened out his posture.
“Damn it,” Thomas muttered, “Paul, what just happened?”
The boy blinked slowly and tilted his head upwards, “The choice has been made for us. The ship is sailing upwards.”
“Why?”
“It's returning to the main ship that is docked above the sky.”
Rodrick’s friend’s face went pale, “Oh, we are dead.” Panic soon descended amongst the mob. The captured farmers and both the free and imprisoned members of the Orhill party ranted amongst themselves.
“Why are they sailing up?” asked Thomas.
Paul replied, “To guarantee that they can finish us off with no chance of us escaping, the commanders on the main ship want us to be dealt with before they send a ship back to one of their port islands with a report.”
“So, they need to physically travel in order to deliver a message?”
“Yes.”
“Paul,” Thomas’s eyes locked with his, “Do you know where the helm of this ship is?”
The youth chuckled, it was the first proper laugh Thomas had heard from Paul since Jackson died, “Easy now, I think you want to be looking at the armoury before you start planning anything else.”
“What are they talking about?” The little girl asked as she tugged Junior’s pants leg.
Junior sputtered as he realised what the pair were planning, “Please don’t tell me you're thinking what I think you're thinking.”
Thomas turned to Junior, softening his eyes as he mustered the most sympathetic expression he could, “Gilligan, sir. You are still our leader. Before anything else, I need to ask you first. Do we have permission to attempt to seize this ship?”