Asadi thought that the longer she was inside the strange domed structure, the more familiar the concrete hallways and rows of stasis tubes would become. While she wasn’t ready to rule it out just yet, she still got chills whenever she looked at one of the aliens’ pale, almost luminescent face.
“Yeah,” Mark said when she commented on it. “They freak me out too sometimes.”
After receiving the mysterious threats over the facility’s comm systems, Mark had suggested that they move to somewhere more secure. Asadi had agreed, so Mark led the way to a command center of sorts. The room was much smaller than the stasis tube-filled chamber, with computers and consoles covering every available inch of wall space and steel tables dominating the center. With only two entrances and plenty of cover, the room was far more defensible than the previous one, although Asadi couldn’t help but feel like they were backed into a corner.
“Here,” Mark said, handing her what looked like an old-fashioned tv remote. “Hopefully we won’t need it, but we might as well be prepared.”
“What is it?” Asadi asked, turning the object over in her hands. It was roughly rectangular, with a leather grip that fit into the palm of her hand and a small knob on one end. Mark raised an eyebrow.
“What do you mean?” he asked. “You guys don’t use beam pistols any more?”
“We use disruptors now,” Asadi replied, nodding in recognition. She’d seen them in colonial police forces; although messy, they were next to indestructible. Realizing that she’d been pointing the weapon at Mark, she checked to make sure the safety was on before tucking it into her belt.
“What the hell’s a disruptor?” Mark murmured, pulling out a beam pistol of his own and flicking the safety off. Then he stopped and stood up a little straighter, his eyes widening a bit. With an almost trancelike slowness, he turned towards Asadi.
“Commander,” he began, his voice rising. “What year is it?”
“2268,”Asadi replied, her eyebrows creasing in confusion. “Why?”
Mark blinked a few times, then sighed.
“Jesus,” he whispered.
He reached out for the table as his legs started to buckle. Although he missed, Asadi rushed forward and managed to grab him before he dropped face-first onto the concrete floor. Realizing that he was far too heavy for her to support, Asadi lowered him to the ground.
“2268,” Mark murmured, staring off into space. “Jesus.”
“I think I need an explanation,” Asadi said, raising an eyebrow. “Actually, a few wouldn’t hurt. Who threatened us, why, and how’d you end up here?”
Mark bit his lip, the color starting to drain from his face. Asadi glanced around the command center, then looked back at Corradi and gave his shoulder a reassuring squeeze.
“Yeah,” Mark said after a moment’s hesitation. “I guess you deserve it.”
“When you introduced yourself, you said you came from the Percheron,” Asadi prompted. “Was that an exploration ship?”
Mark nodded, some of his color returning. Since his normal color was fish-belly white however, it was difficult to tell. Gripping his beam pistol, he began.
“It was one of the Perestroika-class cryoships,” he said. “One man crew, finicky-ass warp drive, stitched together with a little steel and a lot of luck. Went to sleep, then got shot in the general direction of Kepler 22e.”
“But,” he sighed, glancing around the command center. “Their orbital weapons nearly destroyed the ship as I was passing through. First thing I remember after going to sleep was waking up with the Honraxons staring down at me. Not a pretty sight, I can assure you.”
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
“They’re a… they’re a fundamentalist group, similar to the ecoterrorists back home. Do we still have those?” he asked, arching an eyebrow. Not wanting to upset Corradi any more, Asadi nodded and gestured for him to continue.
“They rejected the stasis tubes,” he explained. “And they blame me for… well, it isn’t completely unjustified I guess.”
Asadi’s eyebrows furrowed in confusion, but didn’t have time to ask why before Mark stood up and brushed her aside. Rolling up the sleeves of his navy blue uniform, he leaned into one of the tables and started to push it near one of the entrances. Asadi moved to help a second later, and together the two of them were able to wedge the steel table in the hallway immediately outside the command center.
“Did your captain say when he was going to beam us up?” Mark asked as he walked back to another table, leaning against it as he tried to catch his breath. Asadi, who wasn’t out of breath in the slightest, shook her head.
“We’re not that advanced,” she said. “They’ll come get us by shuttle as soon as they can.”
“Great,” Corradi said, more to himself than to her. “Just great.”
“Why do they blame you?” Asadi asked, trying to keep the conversation going. It was better than trying to fight off the pre-combat jitters. “It’s not like you tried to convert them.”
Mark gave a singular nod, then walked over to one of the wall consoles. This one appeared to be a security system, with about a dozen different monitors showing footage from a variety of dimly-lit concrete rooms. Most were stacked full of stasis tubes; however, Asadi also recognized the sphere room she’d entered from, along with a few others that appeared to be storage and supply closets. Several of them, however, were blank.
“They’re cutting the cameras,” Corradi hissed, keying in a few commands. The image on a few monitors shifted as the cameras behind them panned across the room, only to cut out halfway through. On one though, Asadi saw something. It was only for a split second, since the camera cut out a moment later. But the scarlet gills were impossible to miss. The skin was different, being somewhere near a tawny brown, but it was one of the Honraxi without a doubt.
“So what do they blame you for?” Asadi said. Then she sighed as Corradi slipped into his now-familiar pattern of dodging questions through busywork, walking across the room to a communications console and keying the microphone.
“I’m only saying this once,” he said, his voice sinking dangerously low. “Back. Off.”
He clicked off the microphone, then leaned over to another set of controls and flicked a few switches. In the command center and the remaining feeds, the lights brightened threefold, casting a harsh yellow light over every surface like sickening glitter glue.
A smirk ghosting across his face, Corradi then pressed a series of buttons on yet another console. Even from their isolated position, Asadi could hear a series of metallic groans as steel doors swung shut across the complex.
“There,” he said after glancing back at the monitors. “That’ll buy us some time.”
“Cor Adi,” a stilted, metallic voice said through the communications console. Mark’s head snapped around at the voice, reflexively drawing his beam pistol as well. He cursed to himself, then walked back over to the console and began flicking switches in an attempt to cut off the voice.
“Cor Adi,” the voice repeated. “First you break us… then you bring friends to laugh over our brodies… we trusted you once.”
“Back off,” Mark replied, licking his lips and gesturing for Asadi to watch the entrance. “You know where I am, and what controls I have access to in this place. I didn’t want to pull this card, but you don’t want to see anything happen to them any more than I do. Now back off or I start flipping switches.”
Silence greeted his answer. Mark took a shuddering breath, then glanced back at Asadi.
“That hopefully bought us an hour or two,” he said. Asadi had no response, moving her lips for a second before she remembered how to speak.
“Did you just threaten to do… what I think you-” she began, searching for the right words. However, Mark nodded before she could finish. He looked tired, she noticed, like a parent who’d been worn down after a long day of entertaining a precocious child.
“I don’t want to,” he assured her. “But it was the only thing I could think of. When they realize that we don’t have the stomach for it, they’ll be back.”
“Before they come back, you’re going to tell me why they blame you for all this,” Asadi said, laying her pistol on the table for emphasis. Mark glanced at it, then shook his head. In response, Asadi crossed her arms and refused to budge.
Mark’s lower lip began to quiver, but again he shook his head.
“Well?” Asadi asked. “Did you?”
“The cryo tube,” Mark whispered, staring at the floor. “It was the cryo tube.”