The Heart Of Darkness (part 3)

Posted on Tue Oct 14th, 2014 @ 5:47am by Lieutenant JG Rami Miral & Commander Rylie Cattmor & Lieutenant Commander Dylan Blake & Lieutenant Commander Orin ch’Valri & Lieutenant Jensen Foster

1,182 words; about a 6 minute read

Mission: What Dreams May Come
Location: The Edmorn

Excerpt from Part 2:

Jensen had joined Rami and Cattmor the moment he'd sensed the former's uneasiness. Now it was all he could do to keep his own stomach in check after feeling Cattmor's revulsion as if it were his own. He calmed himself and attempted to keep a professional air about himself. Taking quick scans with his tricorder he spoke, "Definitely one of the crew. Nothing much beyond that, though. Other than the... umm... yeah..." He got up from where he knelt and swept his tricorder out in front of him.

...And now Part 3.


And then the tale-tell blip of a lifesign. Just like before, only now there were two more with it. Odd, considering that the only evidence of life was a dead and mutilated crew member.

As if the powered down ship in the middle of nowhere wasn't scary enough the chatter on the comm added to the growing discomfort, Blake shivered involuntarily despite the suits internal regulator. The sooner they could leave the better.

Jensen walked away from the "art" and kept flicking his gaze from his tricorder to the direction that the "lifesigns" were coming from. He didn't even know if he could call them that, they were so faint. He walked away towards the forward section of the chamber. It was then that he felt the hairs on the back of his neck raise, again, and had the cast a quick glance around to make sure that he wasn't being watched. The sensation alone made his skin crawl.

Meanwhile, across the chamber Blake was attempting to breath life into another console. The portable power supply coaxed the slightly scorched system into life. Bolstered by his success and keen to maintain the power in order to answer some of their burning questions he adjusted the exchange ratio. Fortunately nothing seemed to go too drastically wrong. "Bingo," he announced proudly.

Scrambling up right he tried the keys. The small screen scrolled data: "Commander, I may have found something." Blake called. "They look like some personal logs, a bit degraded but they might help answer what happened."

Cattmor closed her tricorder just as Dylan's words came over the com. "Well done, Lieutenant." she said as she approached, trying to expel the picture of the remains from her mind, and taking in the general scene - a pulsating, not quite stable power, screen with markings that resembled a file directory.

Miral followed her a moment later.

Jensen registered the voices over the comm, and the emotional states of the away team, but he wasn't willing to follow just yet. There were still those fickle lifesigns. Sure, they could be false readings, but then why would he get the feeling of being watched? Other than the whole 'wrecked ship, dead body, not a lot of power' thing, there wasn't really much to support his own instincts. That and he wasn't ready to believe the lifesigns were 'bugs'.

He had walked a good distance away from the others, and was now scanning the forward most section of the area they'd been transported into. Nothing, except for the occasional blip of his tricorder registering those darned blips.

Then something moved.

He turned abruptly and caught a glimpse of what he thought was a person moving off into another alcove. Swallowing back his fear, he walked forward, into the alcove.

And found nothing. No body, no anyone. Nothing. It was just an alcove.

He looked down at his tricorder, expecting something to be showing. Even those darn blips.

Needless to say, he was perplexed to discover that it had gone black. Dark as if it had all the power drained from it. He was now essentially holding a dead tricorder.

Then the sensation of being watched returned. And he realized just how foolish his decision to go off on his own was.

Backing out of the alcove, he turned and quickly headed back towards the others. He closed his tricorder and took a few calming breaths to get himself under control. Even still he couldn't get the sensation of being watched to go away.

"Commander, my tricorder is dead," Foster called out to Cattmor.

"It's not the only thing, Lieutenant." Cattmor said quietly over the com, before approaching the console at which Blake had been working and Miral had joined him.

As the three officers huddled around the small screen, looking at static to begin with, the others also joined them. Finally the static cleared, showing a darkened room which resembled to the main engineering section if the core infrastructure was anything to go by, and only two sections away, bathed in green and red light, though which was the alert status it wasn't clear. Suddenly, the bloodied face of one of the crew, presumably an engineer appeared on the screen, his face mutilated and scratched as if he'd been attacked by a wild animal, shreds of skin still hanging from a few epidermal fibres. He, or it, spoke slowly, breath lost and in a lowered volume, "It's just him and me, now. I've managed to cordon off the section, but that's not stopped him so far." He looked round in fear, thinking he'd heard something before calming slightly to continue on with the recording of the log, perhaps in a vain attempt for someone, anyone to know what happened here. "I know what what's happened, and if given the chance, I know how to fix it. He has hidden the actuator circuits, without which, I wouldn't be able to restart the engines, and without the engines, we're in extreme danger of being pulled into the gravity of one the asteroids littering this nebula. He's also locked out the engineering subsystems with a polygonal code matrix. Even if I could reinstall the actuator, without the code--"

"Without the code--" came another raspy voice over the speakers before the engineer's head was slammed into the console just below the recording unit, another hand holding it there, blood dripping from various gaping wounds, sinewy muscle fibres just visible below the gore.

Rylie wasn't sure if she was the only one, but the spontaneous act, as well as the noise echoing around the room made her jump. Given the situation, she didn't care who, if anyone, noticed.

"Without the code, you don't stand a chance." A gruff laugh could be heard just off camera, almost bordering on maniacal. "Here, I'll fix it so you won't have to watch." As soon as the last word was spoken, the assailant's other hand whipped down with some form of tool or implement and struck just where he'd intended with deadly accuracy, as it punched straight into the other's eye socket, spilling optical fluid, blood, even some brain tissue down the engineer's face and splattering it on the console, before his prone body was flung back a couple of metres using the tool as a lynch-pin.

(To be continued...)

Lieutenant Jensen Foster
Chief Medical Officer

Lieutenant Commander Rylie Cattmor
Executive Officer

Lieutenant Dylan Blake
Chief Operations Officer

Lieutenant JG Rami Miral
Assistant Chief Intelligence Officer

Lieutenant Orin ch'Valri
Chief Security/Tactical Officer

 

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