Entity [ONC 2024]

16

"Samantha. Samantha. Samantha." From out of the void a whisper of a voice came to Porter's ear. "You risk suffering from oxygen toxicity. Please enter into an EV suit and breathe nominal air supply. Samantha. Samantha. Samantha."

Porter opened her eyes to feel an intense pain in her chest, her extremities tingling as though she had slept in the strangest position. With a start, she pushed Ndara away, watching him float, limp, away from her. He had still had his hands upon her throat. Despite the buzzing in her head, the sparks that flew up and down her spine, she managed to replace the sedative capsule and dosed Ndara again. His hands had already started to twitch.

"I'm fine, GAIA. I'm fine." Woozy, Porter looked toward the shuttle airlock and began to pull herself along, almost throwing herself inside. "Chen? Chen! Talk to me!"

"They're still there." Chen's voice came over the earpiece. Flat. After learning that her lover had become infected, Porter could understand that. "How are you going to get through them?"

"Don't ... don't ..." Porter's head slumped but she forced herself to keep moving, dragging the spare EV suit out of the locker on the shuttle. "Don't worry about that. I'm coming. Have you got everything?"

"As much as I could find." A pause followed. "Hurry."

As though Porter didn't know the urgency of the situation. It took far too long to get into the battered, ill-maintained, spare EV suit, not helped by the spinning in her head, or the pains that seemed to travel like electricity through every muscle. GAIA was right, she ran the risk of oxygen toxicity but she needed pure oxygen to seep into every area of the ship for the next part of her plan to work.

Clamping on the helmet, she took in deep lungfuls of regular air, and soon the effects of the oxygen began to dissipate. She could not rest easy. The reason she hadn't told Chen or Ndara all her plan was because of the very thing that had happened. Ndara had known that she would need the EV suit and, when the entity had taken control, the parasite had also known. That had led to the ruin of the EV suits outside. Too much information given away.

Not to mention that if Porter told Chen her intentions, the consequences for those members of the crew that had become infected, she doubted Chen would have allowed it, but Porter felt certain there was no other option. The aliens on the derelict had tried everything they could, but it hadn't worked. The entity had survived in a vacuum and the freezing temperatures of the ice water asteroid. If Porter couldn't kill the entities, she had to try something different.

Outside the shuttle, everything had become quiet. Troubling. Ndara still floated, bouncing against the walls of the passageway and Porter moved with great care toward him. Syringe replenished, she held it at the ready as she detached the net holding the alien data core and the laser welder. For good measure, she hit Ndara with another dose. If nothing else, it could save what remained of the navigator from any further pain that may come.

She checked the settings on the laser welder, satisfied that she could do what she intended, but uncertain she could escape what would happen, herself. It didn't matter. If only Chen managed to get away, that was a victory in itself. Something to celebrate and to poke these parasitic bastards in the proverbial eye.

Mysterious aliens with technologies far beyond the understanding of humans had failed to beat these things and maybe neither would she, but if only one of them escaped, it was enough. What happened afterward would fall to whoever found Chen, or this ship. But finding this ship would prove difficult after what she had done. Luring Mats to the engineering section wasn't the only reason Porter had gone there. She remembered the horror stories from training.

Space was big. Really big. They had pounded that into the heads of all the recruits. Get lost out here and they may never find your bodies. A single degree. A navigational mistake. That was all it took for a ship, or an untethered EVA crew member, to drift away out into an unending, callous and uncaring universe. Lost forever. Their last sight that of far-distant stars in an infinite field of nothing but utter, all-encompassing black.