Flashmaster (Short Horror and SciFi)

Sacrifice

Jenni lifted the glass sphere and studied it with both her blue-black eyes. The stone was oddly heavy, as all the Manji stones were. Inside, a tiny spot of light glittered and crackled. The spot was blue-white and bright enough to make Jenni squint. She slid her backpack off her shoulders and dropped the rock into it.

Now if only she could make it back to the pod.

She flipped back her long, raven black hair and picked up her stick. In front of her a bulkhead door stood blackened and twisted, blown apart god knows how many years ago. She could feel a pit in her stomach. She was not designed for combat. In fact, she was an Engineered with an emphasis in mathematics and fluid dynamics. Useful if you're colonizing an alien world. Not good against an automated defense system that had developed an unfortunate twitch.

She approached the door gingerly and waved her stick on the other side. She heard the defense unit whirr and click but it didn't waste valuable ammunition on a stick. It was programmed too well.

"I'm Jenni A 936." She cried through the door. "I've come for a Manji stone."

"Unauthorized removal of a Manji stone will result in termination." An unsympathetic voice advised her from the next room.

"But I'm a Jenni." She protested. "I am authorized to take a stone."

It was quiet on the other side of the door.

Jenni sighed and, with the sinking feeling she was making a mistake that had been made before, she leapt through the door.

The outer room was brightly lit and she saw the defense unit swiveling toward her out of the corner of her left eye. There were two loud pops and she felt two stings in her side.

Digging at the darts as she ran, she rounded the corner into the corridor. The hallway was a mess, scattered with the long dead bodies of a half dozen Menni and Pinni, each one holding a red or green sphere. There was also a pile of bones and metal scraps in front of a bulkhead where someone, probably a combat model had tried to blast its way into the rest of the ship.

Numbness was spreading quickly across Jenni's side and up into her neck. She only had a few seconds now. Quickly, she ducked into the third hatch on the right, the one with the blue symbol over the door.

Inside, the room was lit by dim blue lights over three consecutive circles of hyber-beds. She stumbled in the dark and pulled herself up to a short pillar in the center of the room. There was the dried husk of a body lying over the pillar. She pushed it to the floor where several other bodies already lay.

Underneath the body was a used Manji stone, dark in the darkened room. She heaved it out of its socket with a single motion and struggled to get her backpack off.

Her face was going numb and she tasted an odd mint flavor on her tongue and in the back of her throat.

She got the new, glittering stone out of the bag and struggled to lift it into the cradle. Her world was swimming and for a moment she couldn't tell if she was pushing the stone up or down. Finally, it clinked into place and she was rewarded by seeing the blue lights in the room brighten slightly.

She told herself to rise but it was clear that the poison had paralyzed her torso and legs. She lay on her side looking at a tiny porthole that led out into the stars. No time she thought. No time to get to the bridge. No way to radio the Earth that something had gone deadly wrong with the security on colony ship N-432 and no way for them to help. In a hundred years another Jenni would wake up, find an ancient corpse lying over the Manji. No doubt she'd end up lying just where this Jenni was. She'd make the same mistake.

But then, when you have no options, what choice have you got?

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