Patterson woke up with Stocky when the airlock warning sounded less than two hours after lying down. She immediately grabbed her pistol and they watched the recorded footage of airlock access. The camera was positioned to peer into the porthole but nothing seemed to be inside.
He reassuringly squeezed her shoulder while rubbing his eyes and yawning. “It’s figured out the new lockdown password.”
She yawned. “Or bypassed it. What do you think it’s doing?”
“I don’t know. I doubt it has found a way to open or cut through the door without us knowing. It might just be trying to get on our nerves.”
“Can it get in?” She knew it couldn’t disengage the permissive interlock from outside. But that one component was now the only thing keeping it out.
“It would have to be stronger than me to break the interlock. And even then, it’s not getting in without making lots of noise. And it will set off the fire alarm if it tries a laser cutter. We’ll have time to greet it with our guns.”
She sighed. Although he was right, it didn’t make her feel any safer.
He looked straight in her eyes. “Don’t give in to fear. We’ll make it.”
She lay back down, set her pistol aside, and looked at him. “That’s scary too. We’ll be all alone.”
He watched her breasts flatten on her chest and her stomach suck in. And he slowly lay down next to her, glancing in her eyes each time he inched closer and then again looking over her body.
She kept her gaze fixed on his eyes and held back her smile. And she raised her arms up to accentuate her figure. She tucked her hands underneath her head.
He gazed at her as if mesmerized and caressed the outline of her ribs from her floating ribs to her sternum. And then he felt through her shirt and found her navel.
She watched his eyes and took a deep breath, heaving her chest. She felt his hand go lower, dipping underneath her shirt. His fingers now glided over her skin, almost tickling her. His hand slid upward.
His touch was tickling in a delightful way. He had tough hands from years of turning valves, using heavy wrenches, and metalworking of the sort she had seen earlier in Command. But he had a gentleness born of respect and skilled precision. And knowing the tamed strength of those hands made his affection even better.
He instinctively began to breathe in her scent. “You’ll see your family again.”
She smiled in appreciation, and from enjoying his teasing. His hand had stopped just short of her breasts, and he was clearly thinking about going further up. Her skin was more sensitive as if every nerve was tuned to his presence, and she didn’t feel the itching of the nettle agent as much. “Maybe. If we take more casualties though then we might not be able to. Sure, TURING runs the ship. It can fly the Nineveh all by itself – until something goes wrong. We could find ourselves stranded long before reaching the waypoint that will be set up.”
He wrapped her in his arms and kissed the side of her head, and then her neck. “Should we go and meet it then? We’re better prepared for it than the other group.” He breathed in her redolence with evident desperation.
Your sense of smell has returned.
His hot breath blew against her face and seized her with momentary apprehension. She could not allow herself to be trapped. She backed her head away and looked in his eyes for a moment. She didn’t see a monster, and she then knew he wouldn’t hurt her. She leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. “I guess we should. TURING, silence alarm.”
He pulled her up to her feet with ease while TURING acknowledged the command and killed the siren. And then he locked lips with her in a frenzied kiss, tilting her back. His hands raced across her back beneath her shirt. His fingers caressed the hook of her bra and she pushed away from him in panic, and fell backward.
He loosened his embrace but did not let her fall. She gazed in his gentle eyes while correcting her posture. She was compelled to smile, and she was likely blushing. They both laughed it off.
Being stuck alone with him for…who knows how long…was going to be a new kind of relationship.
They picked up their weapons and walked in airlock access, and they saw the interior light was now off. He moved some equipment aside to lean up against the door and peer inside. He manually illuminated the interior light and looked but it appeared empty. The door was shut on the other side. He backed away and set the obstructing equipment back in place. “It’s gone back,” he said.
“Why?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe we should wait here for a bit. Assuming Pazuzu was investigating how to gain access, it might soon be back with tools.”
She shook her head. Waiting was a waste of time. They should work to complete a needed task and they could return if Pazuzu entered the airlock again. A new thought popped in her mind and she was sure of it. “I know what to do.” They needed to deny Pazuzu what she now realized it wanted. She had to kill all the life on the ship. Pazuzu was going to do it. But how could she do it in a decent way?
“Let’s hear it,” Stocky said.
“You were right earlier. We must stop Pazuzu no matter what. It’s scorched earth at this point.”
She walked to the comms console and established a channel with the bridge. “Holly? Are you still in Command Gate?” She waited for the answer.
“I hear you, Patterson,” Holly finally answered. “My team is split up right now with half in Command and the other in the Workshops to fabricate equipment. Can you salvage Chandna?”
“Not under the present conditions.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. Are we in agreement that we cannot work out a peace with Pazuzu?”
“Yes, we are.”
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“I have a plan,” Holly said, “but I’m sorry to say that you won’t like it. We’re going to disable propulsion systems and external comms. After that, we’ll draw straws and one of us will fly the Piloting Module out to the spy probe so it can FTL jump our findings back to humanity. The Piloting Module has isolated systems. We know it hasn’t been affected by Pazuzu. The pilot will use its comms unit to broadcast a warning to stay away for any other unfortunate souls that come here. It’s the only way we can be sure a warning goes out.
“A warning would be good. The OSIRIS remnant isn’t far.”
“I want to keep everyone away. If we can contain the Creature then we might be able to survive by using cryosleep to wait for a rescue team. If we can’t then we must be prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice. I’m sorry. I wasn’t ready for this kind of command.”
Everyone will probably die. And it’s mostly on me; my failure was greatest.
“Don’t blame yourself. You were the Junior Officer. Yet you assumed De Silva’s responsibilities in the midst of a crisis.”
She didn’t even bother to ask what was the plan for the pilot. It would likely be the pilot’s personal choice, anyways. The Piloting Module didn’t have any long-term life support capability. The person flying it out would be filled with thoughts about what was the best way to die. And just as unnerving, the waste processing unit would soon fail and the craft would be filled with stench. Lord, help our pilot.
She understood Holly’s meaning, of course. She would not be the pilot because Holly couldn’t be certain that she hadn’t been compromised. The truth was that none of them could be certain about any of the others. Still, she understood why Holly felt a greater level of comfort with her own group. She prayed inwardly that it would prove justified.
“And it’s okay, I wouldn’t want that job anyways.”
“It’s the worst,” Holly said, “but I don’t see any other way of getting this done. I’m going to need a backup copy of all the information that you have obtained on Pazuzu and those safe samples. Can you get me that?”
“I’ll have it for you shortly.” She would need to get a lot of her equipment out of Sci-Med. There would be no going back.
“You’ll have to physically deliver it,” Holly said. “We now know that the internal comms circuits on the Nineveh have been compromised. Maybe external comms too. I can’t fully trust them. Bring the material samples. The more we can provide the better chance mankind will have in creating a defense.”
“Will do. I want to talk to you about next steps anyways. We can keep a distance, if you wish. I want to meet in Farm.”
There was a couple second pause on the channel before Holly spoke again. “Why there?”
“Just come to Farm in an hour and I’ll explain.”
“Okay, we’ll set things in order here and proceed to Farm Gate. I need to gather supplies for the months ahead anyways. Call again when you’re ready to arrive.”
Patterson killed the channel and looked back at Stocky with sadness. “I need you to help me with this.”
He silently watched her for a moment, looking over her body. “Sure, anything.”
She forced a smile and walked out into the hallway. “Follow me; we need to euthanize the animals. We will be leaving Sci-Med, and we won’t be leaving anything behind that’s useful to Pazuzu.”
She prepared a solution of pentobarbital in the lab and then they went to animal care and put Zira and the rest of the birds and mammals to sleep. She felt conflicted. She was glad that Stocky had read her intentions and killed Zira himself. And he did a professional job, holding her gently until she went to sleep. At the same time, she regretted having him do what she could not.
They gathered their things and left. She killed the insects, lizards, and the plants by displacing the room’s oxygen using the fire suppressant system. And then they came back after the gas dispersed, and they incinerated the remains. It wasn’t a perfect job but they could finish it with the big blaze to come.
DNA and RNA denature – that is loosen into open, single strands – at a little under the boiling point of water. Raise the temperature by another three hundred degrees (Celsius) and the thermal energy will start to split the intermolecular bonds between the many bases, sugars, and phosphates. Everything alive in Green and Farm, and which the Nineveh’s crew didn’t require for survival, was a liability to all of mankind. Pazuzu was going to use that against them. But she knew how to make it useless.
She thought about Stocky as they worked their destruction. He was socially awkward and yet always dependable. He was oddly proportioned, but not ugly, and good natured. He had wide-ranging skill and a stout confidence, even if it was a strange one. And he apparently did possess a great deal of self-control. He wasn’t the kind of man that she had imagined spending the last part of her life with. But he was a good one.
“We’re going to do this there too?” Stocky asked. He seemed to already know.
She nodded her head. “We have to destroy everything we don’t need so that Pazuzu can’t use it.” No matter how it hurts us.
----------------------------------------
Holly and her companions met Samoylova near the lift in Command. And they jolted her awake.
“I’m sorry to wake you but Patterson wants to meet.”
“That’s fine,” she said, letting out a yawn. “Did they manage to restore Chandna?”
“No. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not. I don’t trust the Chandna droid. At the same time, it might be immune to Pazuzu infection, and that would be beneficial.” She looked Sam over. “How’s your head?”
“Doesn’t hurt,” she said. She read the concern on their faces. “I’m fine.”
Holly hoped Samoylova’s confidence wasn’t misplaced. She didn’t want to lose their only soldier.
Moussa handed her a shotgun. “We loaded up with double ought.”
She took it. “Alright. But we are going to talk, right?”
“Yeah. Let’s get up to the lounge. We’ve got tomato soup simmering in a stock pot. I want us to get some food and coffee in us before the meeting.”
They went up a deck and sat down to eat after Moussa said a short prayer. They would need to eat as much of the fresh items on the ship in the coming days. Patterson appeared to want to downsize. She would soon learn whether it was for her experiments or just to cull the crop to a more manageable size for the remaining crew.
She waited for everyone to finish and then looked straight at Samoylova. “Can you make explosives with what’s on the ship?”
“I probably can make something of the sort,” she said. “It’s not going to have a whole lot of power. But we still have some dedicated explosives in storage.”
“If our supply is good then fine. We don’t need to blow up the whole ship. We just need the capability to destroy the computer core and FTL drive. We’ll decommission the Nineveh in the same way those aliens did if we don’t win this. Take whatever’s there, and make anything additional that you need.” Her voice got rough and she struggled to get those last words out without coughing.
“Those aliens didn’t stop Pazuzu,” Nieves said. She coughed. “Maybe they slowed it down, but that’s all.”
“I know,” Holly said, breathing slowly. “I’m thinking that you can’t really kill Pazuzu unless you destroy every piece of it. It’s spread too far for us to do that. We’re not going to kill it. We’re going to imprison it out here for hundreds or thousands of years. That saves our families.”
“That’s right,” Moussa said. Everyone looked in his direction. “It couldn’t repair the other ship. It had to bait us here to spread. The probe can warn home, and we can warn anybody that crosses Delta Hydri. And the Americium reactor on the Piloting Module will keep a warning broadcasting for decades.”
“And that’s what we’ll do – if we have to. I still want to find a way to get us home. But if we can’t, we will do what we must. I’m sorry that it has come to this. Remember that Pazuzu can’t take what Yeshua has promised us. We will all meet each other again.”
They nodded in agreement and she finished. “Now let’s see what Patterson wants. We need to get her research.”
She tried her best to remain calm but her heart was racing. The memory of Patterson and Stocky after the confrontation on the Marco Polo kept entering her mind. They each had been hit at least a dozen times judging by their peppered uniforms. And it was apparent that they felt pain from that. But they kept working. That fact more than anything compelled the Polo crew to quit.
And Pazuzu’s spawn didn’t quit. They were destroyed instead.
Fallen angels. At least she could rely on them to kill her if she succumbed to infection first. But Pazuzu would win if they succumbed first. Still, a 50% chance was better than none at all. And she chose to focus on the positives while getting ready to meet Patterson.