Surviving The Theseus (20 page)

The women made it through four walls and were
now on the fifth one, the lipstick searing its way through the
metal walls. After each room was breached, they would bring up the
wall piece they took out and put it back in place as well as it
would go.

Nobody talked, mostly because they wanted to
remain quiet and not give away their position if something strode
by, even though Cindy watched the impact sensors and there was no
activity. And there was no word from Michael, which concerned
Regina and the others, too. She could see worry in their eyes,
especially Cindy’s.

Cindy tried several times to contact him, but
got nothing back. As far as Regina knew, Cindy might be the last of
her team, and she seemed the most inexperienced.

When they got through into Blair’s room, the
first reaction was of surprise and then downright revulsion. A
putrid smell overwhelmed Regina’s nostrils.

Trays of food lay everywhere, including on
the bed and under the covers. Half eaten sandwiches, pizza, strewn
cans and bottles of fizzy drinks of all sorts. Dirty clothes were
scattered on the floor, dresser, TV, and even hanging off one
picture. It was like a bomb went off in a suitcase and this was the
result. The smell was that of rotting meat.

Rachel went right for a floor safe, while the
others looked around with disgust.

"Do you need me to open that for you?" Cindy
asked Rachel.

"Nope,” Rachel said, “Blair actually gave me
the combo after everything went to hell, just in case." Rachel
punched in a code on the digital keypad on the safe, and it opened.
She pulled out a cylindrical device and a pair of glasses that
looked similar to what Cindy was wearing. Rachel pocketed the
cylinder.

"Is that --" Regina started.

"Yep,” Rachel said, “it's the device Blair
used to disable the matchstick linking device in the ship we took
to that planet. Blair said he cracked the encryption on the
glasses, so I should be able to rig it to play on the TV."

Regina didn’t wait for Rachel. "Television.
Power On." The TV looked much like any other monitor Regina had
seen, paper-thin and crystal clear, except much larger. It was
anchored on the wall. A small black panel on the back was visible
when the TV was off, but disappeared when turned on.

The TV powered on, revealing a background
image of Pyramid One and a menu of choices, one of them for
scanning devices.

Rachel took over the commands. "Television.
Scan for devices." Not even a second of processing, a blink of a
clock icon on the television screen, and the following displayed on
the screen: Military issue -- Video Surveillance Glasses --
Multiple Spectrum -- Decrypted.

Rachel looked at Regina and Cindy. "Cross
your fingers." She looked back at the TV. “Television. Play Video
Surveillance Glasses.”

The screen filled with an image of a meadow,
tall grass blowing in a light wind. Five people in form fitting
suits stood in the grass, each looking in a different direction.
They each had a form fitting see-through helmet, two tanks on their
backs, and a shoulder pack strapped forward on their chests.

All the faces Regina could see were male and
had recordable glasses, and each had a rifle strapped around their
shoulders.

Regina looked at Rachel. “Forty four
minutes?”

“Yes,” Rachel said. “That was planet mission
time when we saw the shadow of the man coming back up the
tube.”

A recording time displayed in the top right
corner on the TV read: 00:00:37.

One of the men seemed to scan the air with
some handheld device, looked at the others, and then ripped off his
helmet. He stood, eyes closed, taking deep breaths. The others all
did the same, storing their helmets in their front packs.

The travel device they all came down was
visible, just a few feet away, translucent green, and towering up
into the sky like a cylindrical tornado.

There appeared to be eight men and they
didn’t speak the whole time, not that Regina could hear. The only
sound Regina heard was the breathing of the man whose video they
watched, deep and slow.

Their man scanned the soil. Others didn’t
appear to be doing anything, just walking around.

After what seemed an eternity to Regina, they
broke up into four pairs and all pairs went off in different
directions, slowly, looking everywhere. Regina assumed they went
off in an orderly direction, like North, East, South, and West, but
who knew their strategy for sure?

After twenty minutes planet mission time,
someone broke radio silence, but not their man. “This is Delta 2.
I’ve got a signal. It’s strong. On me in two minutes. I’m prepping
the rocket.”

Their man, and his partner, turned and
ran.

Before the brown blob started consuming
Michael, as he fell over the railing, he knew what had happened. He
knew that it got him and he knew he was falling. And then, instead
of panicking, his body and mind relaxed. He didn't have a care in
the world. Nothing concerned him. He didn't worry about
anything.

His body fell fast. The brown blob also moved
fast, soon becoming golden-brown, encasing Michael. The wide
opening in the middle of the spiral stairs kept his body safe from
the railing, but not from the impending impact to the floor.

When he landed, he didn't feel it and he knew
he wasn't dead. Instead, he came to a realization as images started
making their way into his mind, images he did not control. This was
not the usual inundation of thoughts and images, but something he
was being shown, something he was meant to see. And, when he saw
it, he realized, with the casualness of drinking a cup of coffee,
that they had it all wrong.

Regina, Rachel, and Cindy continued to watch
the video. By the time their man got to the one who broke the
silence, that person had a spherical device on the ground with a
diameter of about five feet. The device looked like a hoola-hoop,
only much thicker, and it was a very bright red. A small black
panel stuck out from a section of the ring. The whole ring looked
sectioned, like it could fold up into itself.

The other man had his front pack on the
ground, pulling out a small, white cylinder with a cone at the top.
He pulled the cylinder from the bottom, extending its size to four
times what it started as. It looked like a small rocket, six feet
long and just under a foot thick.

Rocket Man slammed the bottom of the rocket
on the ground and three prongs popped out of the bottom part,
stabilizing the rocket off the ground in a tripod stand.

Rocket Man’s partner took a thin, black
handheld device and pointed it at the rocket. Within a second of
that, the rocket exploded away from the tripod, a small section of
the cylinder remaining behind, torched from the blaze.

Their man looked up as the rocket took off,
then veered in another direction, and shot off like a bullet, and
then he spoke for the first time. “Time to target?” His voice was
very low and deep.

“Five minutes,” came the reply, from
Hoola-Hoop Man. “Distance is 1115 kilometers.”

“Good,” said Deep Voice Man. He walked over
to the large, red ring and bent down by its black panel. He pressed
some buttons and a fraction of a second later, the ground within
the inside of the ring seemed to disappear. In its place was
blackness. It occurred to Regina just then that the ring was some
sort of transport device, like a miniature gate.

A few minutes later, after Hoola-Hoop Man
stared at something on his wrist, he said, “Target reached. Ring is
set.”

Without a word, every man jumped into the
blackness in the middle of the ring and disappeared through it like
falling into a hole. Deep Voice Man was last. The video signal
snapped to static for one second and then came back on as he popped
up out of the ground, or that’s what it looked like to Regina. When
the video came back on, the image started low, at ground level, and
came up to reveal the others standing and waiting.

Deep Voice Man looked around. The rocket
stuck out of the ground, its point buried, and its back end split
open. Another ring, the one the men popped up through, sat on the
ground five feet away.

Deep Voice turned around. A massive city lay
before them, built into the ground. All the men walked to the edge
of a rock cliff and looked down at the city that seemed to stretch
on forever, and it was miles wide from what Regina could tell. She
saw bridges running from the rock cliff edges down into the city.
The rock floor was broken, with crevices and cracks throughout, so
the city was sectioned, with multiple bridges joining different
sections. The buildings themselves were black, maybe metal, most of
them tall, narrow, and spiking at the top. There were other
smaller, lower, rounded, black metal buildings. From the top of the
cliff down to the rock floor foundation, Regina figured it must
have been five hundred feet.

The men made their way down a rock path and
started onto a bridge into the city. Deep Voice lagged behind,
watching behind and to the sides, looking down over the edge of the
bridge to an abyss. It was an odd location to put a city, built
onto what seemed to be towering rock formations, like mesas. Maybe
there was a heat source below, because the sun did not provide a
sufficient source.

Regina almost missed it, because Deep Voice
panned left and right constantly, but the brief glimpse of a
stiffening body and grayish substance oozing from the orifices of
the lead man were unmistakable. The men were under attack and, like
Regina and the rest of the Pyramid unfortunates, they would have no
idea what the hell was going on.

As soon as the first man dropped like a stone
onto the hard, metal bridge, the others drew up their weapons in a
back-to-back formation. It wasn't until another of them went rigid
and fell hard to the bridge surface that they scattered, Deep Voice
turning and running back the way he came, the others close
behind.

"Abort," Deep Voice said.

Regina couldn't see what was happening to the
others, because Deep Voice was in the lead and facing the other
way. But she could hear the men behind, their voices loud.

"RUN! Just fucking run!" came one voice,
high-pitched and panicked, cracking.

"Darian! Darian!" came a different voice.

"Forget him,” came the panicked, cracking
voice again. “He's gone. Run!"

Shots were fired, a barrage of bullets. Deep
Voice stumbled suddenly. He looked down at his leg, bubbling with
blood, and continued on at a hard limp.

The gunfire continued for seconds and then
stopped.

Deep Voice spoke. "Comm Set. Display at one
second intervals all spectrums."

As different visual spectrums cycled through
on the screen, Deep Voice made his way up the rock path. The mini
gate could be seen in the near distance when he cleared the
ridge.

During one of the spectrum intervals, Regina
thought she saw something that looked like an unusually tall man,
almost out of Deep Voice's view to his left. Either he didn't see
it or he ignored it, continuing to run as hard as he could toward
the gate.

Deep Voice stopped and panned around. Only a
glimpse was caught of two men behind him, before he turned back
around. He ran and yelled back at the others. "Go to visual
spectrum nine. Comm set. Go visual spectrum set nine."

As soon as he said this -- the gate just a
few feet away -- Regina saw the tall man again and four others.
They towered over Deep Voice by at least two feet, skeleton thin.
There were no features, just long legs with knees that seemed to
bend both ways, long arms, no distinguishable genitalia, and an
elongated head shaped like a large carrot with the point at the
top. The fingers on both hands were very long, and on the right
hand, a short point, like a needle, stuck out of each of the four
fingers. There were no thumbs. And, probably due to the spectrum
they were viewing these creatures in, all Regina could see was a
blue hue to the body.

She assumed these were the creatures on
Pyramid, but from what she felt of one, it didn't resemble the ones
on the screen. The Pyramid creatures seemed shorter and more
rotund.

A voice from behind Deep Voice said, "Jesus
Christ!” and then someone opened fire.

Deep Voice turned too late to try and avoid
it, and he took two bullets to the gut. It appeared to be just
panic fire, most likely toward some creature near by. Deep Voice
turned and launched himself into the mini gate, jumping onto the
platform and disappearing into it.

The video went to static and then came back
again as Deep Voice transported to the receiving end. When he
popped through the other side, the picture snapped back. He was
still in creature-vision mode, and from what Regina could tell,
nothing was around him. He hobbled toward the transport tube as
fast as he could, which was surprisingly fast being that he had two
bullet wounds in his gut, and at least one in a leg. Regina could
imagine the pain to be excruciating, but he didn't voice it. He
strode along at a pace between a walk and a run, looking back
frequently but not slowing when he did.

Steps away from the tube device, he glanced
behind, and saw one of his companions making their way towards him,
probably the one who panic-fired. The companion ran at full bore,
looking to have no injuries. One of the creatures came through the
mini gate, seeming taller than before, legs long like a giraffe,
catching up to Deep Voice's buddy in mere strides. It pricked him
in the back with one of its fingers on its right hand, and the man
went rigid and then collapsed. Regina saw stuff oozing from all
orifices visible. Dead.