Survivor, page 11
He was leaning over the girl, sucking her dry. Her skin went pale as the blood was drained out of her. She struggled at first, but the energy slipped out of her and she fell silent. The man continued to suck until there was nothing left. He lifted his head from the girl, grinning. He stood up and let her body fall to the concrete, sprinting out of sight.
"Hey! Are you ok?" Nova called to the girl. There was no response.
Nova struggled back to her feet and stumbled towards the girl. She held her hands out in front of her face but she couldn't remember why. Her lip was bleeding.
Her hands slammed into something solid and rough. She frowned and stared hard at the air in front of her face; something shimmered. She looked harder and in an instant, the world disappeared around her.
She was back in a sandstone room, facing a solid wall and surrounded by spatters of blood.
She lifted a finger to her bloated lip, then drew it away, covered in blood.
She whirled in a circle. The room was just as she remembered. There was no sign of the forest or the city.
The door.
Nova ran to it, pushing and banging against it. There was no response from the other side.
"Cal! Cal! Can you hear me?" Nova's eyes rolled. There was no reply.
The ground tilted beneath Nova's feet. She was thrown off balance and collapsed. The walls vibrated and rocks dropped around her. She closed her eyes and sheltered her head with her arms.
The quaking continued for three minutes. Only when she was sure it had stopped, did Nova open her eyes. Something was different. The body and blood were gone. The door was open!
She ran to the doorway and peered into the tunnel beyond. There was no sign of life, just the dark corridor lit by blue lights. It seemed cleaner than before. There was less dust and loose dirt.
She looked back but there was no sign of her gun. Maybe she'd fallen asleep and the Ancients were playing some kind of trick on her? She felt naked without her weapon, but she didn't have a choice. She had to get back to Crusader.
She tiptoed along the tunnel. She had no hope of remembering the way, so she settled herself with always turning right. Eventually, she had to get to the exit. Her feet scraped along the rough floor, but there was nothing she could do about it. She pushed forward.
So much of her body ached. Her ribs cried out for attention, her head pounded, and her lip was bloated and bruised. No matter what Cal said, there was no way she was going to stay on this planet. Let the universe be damned. She'd fly away. There had to be somewhere that the Ancients couldn't get to.
Voices shook Nova out of her reverie. She slowed down and crept forward towards the sound. It wasn't hard to find them. Two Ancients, both in black armour with eye-slits that glowed yellow, were talking. They stood close together, their heads bent forward.
"You understand your orders?"
"We are to stay here until the tomb is disturbed. From there we will carry out our sacred duty to guide the galaxies forward."
"Correct. I don't know how long this plague will last or how bad it will be. Perhaps we'll survive it, in which case I'll see you in a few weeks. If we don't-"
"You will."
"If we don't, then it's your job to finish what we started."
"I understand."
"Good, now get on with you."
The two Ancients held up their hands. Yellow light shone out from their armoured palms. The light grew brighter as they moved their hands closer. Their hands connected and the yellow light sparked brighter before it died out.
They turned away from each other. One of them walked into a deep room and the other slid a massive door in front of the entrance. After sealing it shut, the alien walked away from the tomb with its head hung low.
Nova followed. She crept behind the creature as quietly as she could manage. It was hard when everything hurt, threatening to fall apart beneath her.
The creature's back was bent as if it carried a massive burden.
Nova's mind raced. If the Ancients were worried about a plague then maybe they weren't as big a threat as they pretended to be. It sounded like all she had to do was wait until the aliens died of natural causes. That would certainly help her guilty conscience when she left the known galaxies.
The Ancient led her straight up to the exit, and she followed it into the moonlight. The red and blue glowing moons illuminated the scene before her. The Ancients had been busy while she was gone. The alien ships were arranged in neat rows, built and ready for invasion. There was no sign of the Confederacy ships, or bodies for that matter.
Nova frowned; something wasn't right. She couldn't tell how long she'd been gone, but surely it would have been easier for the Ancients to leave the Confederacy ships wherever they fell. They wouldn't bother moving them. There was something else; a sinister red glow covered the landscape.
Nova's heart leapt into her throat.
The red moon had been destroyed by the Ancients. She'd watched it happen. The whole thing was reduced to a black-hole and then nothing.
She looked up and stared. The red moon glowed above them as if nothing had happened. There was no sign of the black-hole.
A rumbling roar surged from the fleet. The entire armada's engines fired and they lifted into the sky. They created an intimidating force; so many powerful ships with unimaginable technology. There was no way for Nova to stop them now.
The air thundered with the force of the ships. Gale-force winds rushed past and sent her flying backwards. She landed with a hard bump.
Back inside her sandstone prison.
"What!"
The panorama of the outside, of the ships taking off, was gone. Instead, she was back inside the small room with Tobius's body. The blood stains were still there as was her gun. The door was shut.
Nova clenched her head in her hands.
She remembered clear as day following the yellow-eyed alien back up into the world. Why was she back here? How!
She scrambled over to her pistol and, with shaking hands, put it into her belt's holster. At least she was armed. Whatever mind games the Ancients were playing with her, at least she was armed.
Rage burned inside. She hated whoever kept laughing. She hated the voices, just at the edge of her hearing and the sights and smells she couldn't quite perceive. She hated feeling like there were a thousand eyes on the back of her head and that her mind was on the very edge of madness.
Most of all, she hated the damned room.
She stomped over to the door. All the rage bubbled inside her. It felt as if a vat of acid had been poured into her veins and coursed through her. Her whole body felt red and raw; her chest was constricted, burning with fury.
She reached the door and raised her fist above her head, swinging it forward with all her might. She would break through this door, chipping away individual specs of sand if she had to.
Her fist sailed towards the door. In her mind's eye streaks of red trailed behind it, like the blazing trail of a rocket.
Just as it was about to hit the door, Nova's hand disappeared.
She stared at the piece of empty space, her mouth gaping.
The anger drained from her body as she stared up at the impossibility. A cold spear of icy dread went through her heart and dropped to her stomach. Her wrist ended in empty space and she could see right through to the door beyond.
Panic rose in her throat. It was hard to breathe or think.
It felt like her fingers were still there. She waved them back and forth, feeling the air brush past them.
Vomit threatened again, this time from pure panic. Perhaps she had slipped into the abyss of madness. It was the only way to explain what she was seeing. Tears welled at the corners of her eyes.
She imagined throwing a grappling hook and catching the very last shreds of her sanity.
She did the only logical thing; she stepped backwards.
Miraculously, her hand reappeared. It was as if it withdrew from behind a curtain. Her palm, followed by her fingers, came into view. Only it didn't look like her hand, it was dark, practically black, and covered in a fine powder.
She brought her hand to her face and stared at it. Soot. There was a fine layer of ash and soot over her hand. She frowned deeper and rubbed her hand on her torn jeans. With each pass, more soot came off.
She kept looking at the appendage as if it could disappear at any moment. For all she knew, it could.
She shook her head. Despite everything she'd seen there had to be a logical explanation. She walked towards the door and swiped her left hand through the air. Nothing happened. She lifted her right arm and waved it through the area. Again nothing happened.
She tried a few more times, but her hands remained firmly in place. She sighed and stomped to the far corner. She slumped down and stared between the door and her hand.
She had only one explanation; she'd been subjected to the time vortex and in response she'd gone mad. It made sense. What sort of person could see all of time and space flying by them and not go mad? It was the only natural response. So here she was, trapped in a tiny room of her memory.
"But if I were mad," Nova said to herself, "Wouldn't I know it?"
"No. That's the whole point," she replied.
She rolled her eyes, trying to bring her panic under control.
Usually she prided herself on being a rock, completely unshakable.
The Ancients had shaken her.
Whatever she may have seen in the past, nothing had prepared her for the madness she faced. Things swirled on the edges of reality, or perhaps reality swirled at the edge of her madness.
She closed her eyes and leant against the wall. If she was going to survive her madness, she was going to need sleep, and a lot of it. She let her mind drift, floating from one daydream to another. It was difficult to relax when she was sure that her mind was lost.
She thought about everything she'd seen while in the time vortex. Entire galaxies had flown past. She could have been there forever, watching every bit of reality happening at once. But if she'd done that, she would have gone mad.
"You're already mad," she said to herself and giggled.
The first picture she remembered was of a bright light. It had looked like a picture at the time, but in her memory, it was a movie. She watched in slow motion as the bright light expanded out. It was intense, immeasurable. In front of it pieces of rock and dust blew out on a wave in front of the bang.
Nova's vision homed in on a rock. There were so many facets to it; so many surfaces. It spun through space. It had no destination, just the force pushing it onwards, outwards. There were colours everywhere. The bright white light was broken up into every colour imaginable.
The colours bounced around her body in an inconceivable rainbow. Her tiny rock rolled with her, also bathed in the many-hued light. Blues and purples shimmered next to greens, yellows, reds. A psychedelic mixture filled her mind. There were colours here she couldn't name. Some of the light went into the infrared and ultraviolet spectrum and yet somehow she could see them, she could see everything.
She could see the future path of the rock; how it would spin through space before reaching another rock and then more until together they formed a planet.
Everything around her was the same. She could see the past and future of everything. Every speck of dust had a story, every atom of every star going on through big bangs and crunches.
It was too much for her mind to handle. There was too much information. This was why she'd stopped looking into the vortex in the first place. Why couldn't she stop seeing it? She forced her eyes open but they were blinded by bright white light, as if she was staring into the very heart of a supernova.
Someone was screaming.
Nova squeezed her eyes shut and opened them again. The screaming was louder. It was her. She was curled up on the sandy floor, writhing.
Her hands were clenched in her hair.
She closed her mouth, confining herself to stifled cries. She stopped convulsing, instead staring straight at the door and thinking how peaceful death could be. Her memory shied away from the vortex, from everything she'd seen. She drew deep breaths. She had to stay calm, to keep the madness at bay.
There was someone at the door.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Nova whimpered in the darkness. She rocked back and forth, her back hit the wall every few seconds. There were noises outside the door, but she didn't trust her ears, not with all the other noises echoing around her.
The noise got louder. It was footsteps, footsteps outside the door.
Nova's heart clenched. She couldn't stop terror rising in her throat as panicked thoughts crashed around her head. If an alien came down, then she had to do something. They'd show her the time vortex again and there would be no coming back from that. Assuming she'd made it out the first time.
Grinding came from the door and the massive stone block slid to the left. Nova's gaze was pinned to it. Her shaky right hand clasped her gun. Her palm was sweaty and the gun threatened to fall out. She clutched it tighter and pointed it towards the door.
She would only get one chance. The alien wouldn't hesitate to kill her; it probably thought she was already dead. It was impossible to tell how long she'd been trapped with Tobius's body. With the hallucinations swirling around her, time had become meaningless.
The door opened wider and the glint of metal was all the confirmation she needed. She rested her hand on her knee to steady it, staring down the barrel.
"Tobius, are you done with the human? What did she say?"
The door opened fully and an armoured alien stepped through. The helmeted head glanced around the room in confusion and then down at Tobius. The Ancient whirled around to face Nova, reaching for its gun.
She didn't wait a second longer, squeezing the trigger. A blue blast of energy slammed into the red button at the creature's neck. An audible click signalled that the helmet was loose.
She fired two more shots.
The first sent the helmet flying free and revealed the hard flesh underneath. The third shot slammed into the creature's face and melted the expression of surprise. The Ancient stumbled backwards and fell in a heap next to Tobius, dead.
Her hand shook worse than before. It rattled from side to side. She couldn't trust herself not to shoot her own face off. She lowered the pistol back into its holster. It took four tries before she managed to push the gun into place.
She stared at the open door. It looked real enough, but she'd already escaped once from the small room. It could be another mirage, another trick of her imagination.
She pushed against the wall and hauled herself onto her feet. The room spun around her. Her thoughts flitted around her head like moths searching for a flame. Noises and colours swirled at the edge of her senses. She tried to block them out, to focus on what was in front of her, but it was hard. There was so much going on at the edge of her awareness. She was sure she saw herself a couple of times.
"That's impossible," she said, shuffling towards the open door.
The corridor was dusty and covered in sand, just as she remembered from when she first arrived but very different to the last time she'd walked it.
"It was just a dream," she said.
"Then if you follow the same path it won't take you outside," she replied.
She nodded firmly. There was only one way to separate reality from imagination. If she followed the same path she'd taken in the dream, there was no way it could lead to the outside, and then she'd have proof.
She strode into the corridor. She remembered the path as if it was burned into her memory. She remembered hearing the voices and following the Ancient through the catacombs. She followed the twists and turns of the tunnels.
The further she went, the more the hairs on the back of her neck stood on end. The path was so familiar, and yet she'd never been here before, except in a dream. The corridors turned and split just as she remembered. Every step was like a familiar dance.
By the time light spilt through the end of the tunnel, her breathing was ragged. The proof she'd been looking for, that it had all been some vivid dream, was nowhere to be found. Somehow the path had led her straight to where it promised: outside.
Only this time, when she crept out of the tunnel, she was faced with the broken remnants of the Confederacy forces. The Ancients were still working on building their ships. There was no sign of the formidable force which Nova had watched take off.
Her head ached, crying out in agony. It all blended into one. She stumbled away from the tunnel entrance and into the trees. She clutched her head in her hands; her eyes were narrowed slits.
Outside, the sounds were worse. A cacophony beat at her eardrums, a million voices begging to be heard. The light was just as bad; so many different shades and colours pierced through her eyeballs. She shut her eyes tight, but the colours were still there. She stumbled on through the trees until she was far from the tunnel entrance and out of view of the Ancients.
She leaned against a thick tree and looked around. There was no one in sight.
"Cal?" she said.
"Nova!" Cal replied, "Where have you been? What is all that noise? What's going on around you?"
"I don't know," she whispered. She felt like breaking into tears at the familiar voice. "I don't know what happened."
"Come back to Crusader. It's not safe for you to be out there."
"I can't," she said. "I have to see someone. They're everywhere. There has to be a way to stop it."
"Nova you're not making any sense," Cal said. "I need to run a full diagnostic."
"No time," she said. "All the time."
"Nova!"
Her mind slipped away from her robot and floated around the trees. There was so much going on all around her. Day and night, winter and summer; it was all here. Some of the trees were covered in snow, while others were in full bloom. Midday sun lit some branches, whilst others were cast in the blue glow of the planet's moon.
