We spent another three hours trundling along on top of the transport drone. We already knew from our view of the exterior that the station was massive, but travelling through the interior really drove it home. And the fact that all we’d seen so far was featureless corridors was extremely frustrating on top of the awe. It struck me that with the exception of the lift ride, we could have been going in circles and it would have been difficult for us to tell.

  Jophixa made the decision that we would take it in turns to try to get some sleep, if even only a quick nap to try to keep us fresh. She ordered Tindron to take the first rest, and he settled down on one of the couches as best he could and closed his eyes. Jo and I, in the meantime, continued to keep watch.

  After a while, I started to hear odd interference coming from my comms unit, and began intermittently setting up diagnostics to look for what was causing it, but everything kept coming back clear. It was starting to become rather distracting, and Jophixa picked up on it.

  “Problem Mister Aacen?” she asked, tossing me a scowl before going back to watching the corridor.

  “Just some weird noise on my comms unit.” I explained, “Every so often I get this burst that almost sounds like chatter on an out of phase channel. Stacy, maybe you can do something to clean it up? I don’t want to end up distracted at the wrong time and get any of us killed.”

  Jophixa gave a nod of approval at my thought process, but the response that came back from Stacy was concerning. “Thomas, I’m not detecting any comms interference or signal noise being routed to audio output. Everything is clear and normal. I’m beginning a diagnostic of the implant to see if it is causing some anomalous neural activity in your audio centers. It’ll mean you’ll be swapped over to the backup translator in your suit’s augmented reality system until its complete.”

  “ETA till that’s complete Stacy?” Jophixa asked, scowling

  “For a thorough diagnostic; ten minutes commander.” was Stacy’s answer, “But I could finish a cursory check in two.”

  “Go ahead and do the thorough scan.” Jo ordered after a moment of thought. “I think we can handle the situation for that long. And Mister Aacen is right; I don’t want him getting repeatedly distracted by this. Might not be able to fix the issue if it’s the implant, but if he knows that’s where it’s coming from, it’ll be easier to ignore. Correct?” She directed the question to me.

  “Yeah, as long as I know where it’s coming from, I can filter it out mentally.”

  “Sepaq, Commander: diagnostic beginning now.”

  “This is frustrating as hell.” I grumbled, going back to keeping watch, “Sorry I’m not as solid in this situation as Tindron is Commander.”

  She threw me a glance, but was quiet for a few minutes. I tried to put it out of my mind, I’d never claimed to be combat trained, and logically she shouldn’t hold it against me. I just…

  “Look Mister…look Thomas.” She eventually said, breaking the silence, “I’m not going to shoot waatko in your ear. It’d be a whole lot easier in a situation if you were combat trained. But not every mission is under ideal circumstances, and sometimes your best shot at success means giving up a trained soldier for a techie.

  “You’re doing alright Thomas - for a non-combatant.” she sighed, “If I come off harsh, remember that it’s in order to keep us all alive. You’ve learned our tech damned fast with the aid of the sleep lessons Stacy has been providing, and Boudya has said how adept you are at dealing with alien tech, to the point of wondering why you weren’t hooked up with xenoarchaeology research instead of salvaging.”

  I chuckled, “Yeah, she’s asked me the same thing.”

  “Well, whatever the reason, I’m glad you’re here. I need you on this team. Just try to keep your head in the game okay? Stay focused, and if I get cranky with you, it’s because I’m trying to keep you alive. Just do what I tell you and we’ll stay alive.”

  “Thanks Commander…Jophixa.” I shot her a hesitant smile, “I’ll do that.

  She leaned over and punched my hip like she had earlier in the day. “Once Tindron wakes up, you go grab some rest. We giobhioni are used to longer day cycles, I’ll be good for a while longer yet. And I need you fresh.”

  “Commander…”

  “What did you just say about doing what I said?”

  “Aye, Commander.”

  Ten minutes later, Stacy came back with the results of the diagnostic. “I’m sorry Thomas, but everything checks out with the implant. There are no anomalous interactions between it and your auditory cortex. It does not seem to be the source of the noise you are hearing.”

  “Stacy, I want you to start running scans for anything out of the ordinary. Use every sensor you can, both on all of us, and on the Elegance.” I instructed, squeezing my eyes shut, and once again hand up and bouncing it off my helmet visor - this time in an attempt to pinch the bridge of my nose. “Fucking helmet. I forgot how annoying it was not being able to rub your eyes when you have a headache!”

  “Tzaki Tratsa has just informed me she has sent an authorization to your suit to release a mild analgesic to your next dose of water Thomas.”

  “Thank you. And thank her for me.”

  “Done. She’s also asked me to start relaying neurological data from the implant to her. She wants to make sure to cover all angles. With the high level of X-rays in the system, and the unknown nature of the technology in this station, perhaps there is something else at play here.”

  “Not a bad idea.” Jophixa put in, “Monitor whatever you can get from my implant as well Stacy. I know you don’t have the same unrestricted connection to mine as you do Mister Aacen’s, but if something is messing with our thoughts, whatever warning we have, could be helpful.”

  “Sepaq, Commander.”

  Great. I thought to myself. So I might be going crazy in an alien space station. What a wonderful adventure I’m on.

  About an hour later, Tindron got up from where he’d been sleeping on one of the couches and stretched. When he was done, he walked over to us. “Been a while since I’ve had to sleep in an EVA suit. Not my most favorite experience in the galaxy. Whichever of you is next, the couch is all yours.”

  Glancing at Jophixa to verify she hadn’t changed her mind on her earlier orders, I got a curt nod, so walked over to the couch and stretched out.

  Tindron wasn’t wrong. Getting comfortable enough to sleep while in full EVA gear is not an easy task. I’ve done it any number of times in my life, including back on the planetoid where all this business began, and I didn’t even have anything remotely like a couch to stretch out on. Just hard, raw rock. Still, I must have been pretty tired, because I slipped unconscious pretty damned quickly.

  I awoke in absolute darkness.

  “Tooooooooommy”

  The voice coming out of the darkness was a raspy whisper, echoing all around me as if I were trapped at the bottom of a deep pit. It ran up and down my spine like the cold icy fingers of death.

  “Toooooommy-boy.” The voice game again, drawing out my name tauntingly. Behind that whisper as coarse as a farrier’s rasp was the hint of familiarity that tickled at my memory, but the rest of my mind was paralysed in fear. The darkness was so absolute, and the voice spoke of dread and danger. Danger so deep my muscles were frozen as if in glaciers.

  “It’s no use hiding Tommy-boy. I can feel your heart trembling like a little bitty bug trapped in a web!”

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  Slowly, I could see a sickly reddish light, so slowly I thought it was a trick of my mind in the darkness, but the light grew closer. And as it grew closer I realized it was not a single light source but multiple, a dozen, two dozen, I lost count, all of them moving in this weird back and forth motion as if on rails.

  And the shadows cast by those lights were the shapes of innumerable legs. Sharp, spiny legs covered in bristly hairs. Multi-segmented legs that made clickity-clickity noises on the floor as they moved closer and the shadows grew ever more menacing.

  My mind seized on the name for what I was seeing. “K…ktonshi!” I gasped out, reaching for my coil gun, only to find it missing.

  “Aye, Tommy-boy,” said that voice again, now dangerously close it seemed almost in my ear. It was so distinct that the memory of its familiarity stabbed through my mind like a white hot ice pick.

  “Son of a bitch.” I growled past my fear, “Barstol?”

  A face shot out of the darkness to stop less than a meter from me. There was definitely a passing resemblance to the Johnathan Barstol I knew, but gone was the scraggly unkempt beard, replaced by baby faced cheeks, his forehead had been stretched back in a nightmarish, eldritch way, and now held ten glowing eyes of swirling black and sickly red. The overall effect was as if someone had made a kewpie doll of his face, and then fed it through the mind of HR Geiger. And when he saw me flinch back from the sight of him, the lower half of his face split wide open, revealing the pedipalps and maw of a spider.

  I had a momentary flashback to a nightmare from not that long ago, and screamed out “STACY! WHY AREN’T YOU SHOOTING IT!”

  But there was no answer. Just whispers in the dark, the whispers of strange words, spoken by alien throats, by vocal cords far more complex than anything ever seen by mankind.

  Two impossibly large, sharp looking front legs came up in front of Barstol’s demonic face as his pedipalps vibrated with excited glee. “Oh, You’re sweet little computer girl can’t help you here Tommy-boy.” his grin grew wider, and those legs lifted higher, and quivered like springs about to be released. “It’s just you and us Tommy-boy. And I’ve got a score to settle, I do.”

  My hand shot out and groped around in desperation again, looking for that damned coil gun. It had to be here somewhere. But I couldn’t take my eyes off of the Barstol-thing, I was terrified of not seeing those spear like legs coming to pierce me right through if I turned away. Another scream tore through my throat as I saw those legs stop moving higher and quiver harder.

  I saw the moment they began to descend…

  “NOOOOO!” I screamed.

  And then my hand landed on the coil gun.

  “Commander, something’s wrong.”

  Jophixa looked up from where she was standing watch. The transport drone had just turned the corner and was heading towards what looked like it might actually be a control room of some sort. It was looking like they were finally going to have something to do other than watch featureless corridors go by, but now…

  “What is it, Stacy?” but then she looked back and caught sight of Thomas where he was sprawled on the couch.

  Only he wasn’t sprawled unconscious anymore, he was tossing back and forth and spasming violently. “What’s going on?” she said, starting to walk over, intending to shake him awake.

  “I’m picking up unnatural levels of theta and gamma waves in his neurological activity.” Stacy explained. “I think he’s having a nightmare of some sort, but this isn’t like anything he’s shown before when dreaming. And these levels are far outside the normal for humans. I’m consulting with Tratsa at the moment and…”

  “Stacy?”

  “Jesse and Lieutenant Kintzel have begun to display erratic behavior Commander, and Tzaki Tratsa performed a quick brainwave scan on them. They are showing the same gamma-theta wave elevation. It’s only the three humans on board that are affected!”

  Jophixa scowled now right beside Thomas and reaching out to shake him. He wasn’t responding at all, just continuing to thrash about, one arm accidentally connecting with her helmet and knocking her a bit to the side. “Do either of you know what the hell is causing this? I have no idea how we’ll get Thomas back to the ship in this condition, and it looks like we might have finally arrived where this drone was taking us.”

  “I…” there was a pause then Stacy did something Jophixa hadn’t ever heard her do before. She swore at herself. “How did I not pick that up before? How was I so stupid!?”

  “Stacy! That doesn’t help! You can kick yourself later. Explanations now!”

  “There is a particularly odd form of infrasound permeating the station in bursts Commander.” she explained, “It might actually be the station’s VI systems trying to communicate with us, if my guess is correct. The problem is, humans have a bad physiological and neurological reaction to certain types of infrasound. Depending on intensity and duration of exposure, it can cause anything from simple nausea to…”

  Thomas let out a terrified, heart wrenching shriek, and Jophixa felt herself being backhanded away. When she rolled back onto her feet, she noticed several things happening at once.

  They had finished trundling into the room she had, rightfully it seems, thought of as a control center. The transport drone gently mated up to the side of a large table at scale to the rest of the station. The railing at the end of the transport drone slid back, and a series of lights on her HUD and on the deck of the drone lit up indicating they should exit onto the table.

  From a hole in the center of the table, a large…being rose up. Like a cross between an octopus and a jellyfish, it floated up as if it were a jellyfish floating in an ocean, but the tendrils underneath reached out like the tentacles of an octopus, manipulating controls on various panels and surfaces. All that while one, meter wide, cross pupiled eye swivelled to look down on them.

  And all the while that was going on, Thomas had his coil gun in hand and was running towards the table, screaming the word “no” at the top of his lungs. He began firing the coil gun wildly, seemingly randomly. But to Jophixa’s combat trained eye, she saw that each shot was aimed, not just popped off at random. He was shooting at something, even if that something wasn’t there for her to see.

  Tindron ran towards him and attempted a flying tackle trying to take Thomas to the ground and restrain him. Thomas spun his coil gun around and for one heart tearing moment, she thought he was going to fire on Tindron, but instead, he used the muzzle to strike Tindron and divert his tackle from connecting.

  “Thomas!” She shouted. “Thomas, stand down! It’s not real!”

  But he couldn’t seem to hear her. “Stacy, can you...”

  “He’s not listening to me either Commander. I've been yelling through the implant since he woke up and he’s just not responding!”

  “You said once you could possibly take his body over in an emergency! I think this counts!”

  A split second pause then, “I’ll try. One moment.”

  But as she said that, Thomas had reached the center of the large table, and the large hole from which the alien had come up through. He had moved incredibly fast, likely propelled forward on wings of adrenaline. But no matter how quick adrenaline made him, they would not give him wings to help with what he did next.

  When he reached the edge of that orifice in the table, he leaped out, hung in the hair for just a moment, then fell, still screaming defiance at whatever he was seeing, into the mystery below.

  Jophixa stared at where Thomas had been just a moment ago. Tindron was picking himself up off the deck from where he’d landed after trying to dive-tackle Thomas to the ground, looking around to see where Thomas had gotten off to, before looking back at her. “Where did he…?” He got out before her shock broke and she bolted over to the center of the table.

  “THOMAS!!!” The name tore out of her throat with a catch that felt like something physically wounding.

  She skidded to a stop at the edge of the precipice and looked over the edge, hoping she’d find him to find him hanging off of some ledge or whatever, and they could figure some way to haul him back up. “THOMAS!” she screamed again. “Damn it! Answer me!”

  A moment later, Tindron was beside her, looking over the edge. “He didn’t…?”

  All she could do was mutely nod, she just couldn’t answer him.

  “Well fuck.” He swore, and his whole body sagged, “Boudya isn’t going to like this one bit.”

  “Excuse me?” A strange voice said through their comms system, there was a very odd tonal quality to it, like music being played slightly out of key. “Was that individual with you, or with the group that was here before?”

  They both looked up and into the eyes of that strange jellyfish/octopus and the enormous cross pupiled eyes that had lowered down to within only a meter of them, staring intently. Jophixa opened her mouth, but was having trouble getting her voice to work. Seeing this, Tindron stepped in, “He was with us. It seems there was some kind of infrasound being emitted in this station, and it has a very deleterious effect on his species.”

  The gigantic eyes blinked and started back slightly. “Oh. Oh dear me!” came the response, sounding stricken by the information. “This is most upsetting, my sincerest apologies! I have been trying to communicate with your group ever since you arrived. It seems I have inadvertently harmed your crewmate. Is his species able to fly?”

  “Can he fly?” Jophixa asked, finally getting her voice to work, “No he can’t fly! He’s, he’s probably…”

  The cross shaped pupils actually spun around in place before the enormous head/body turned, and tentacles reached out to manipulate some controls. “Ah, one moment.” the alien paused, “Yes, there he is. He has not reached the bottom yet. I have lowered the gravity so slow his descent, and will begin reversing it sufficiently when he is close to the bottom. Again, my apologies, and so that I cease doing damage to him, I will switch to using synthesized speech only. This does explain the events pertaining to the previous visitors. I have logged a revised communications protocol for future encounters with unknown species.”

  “Now, I am going to need you to explain why a giobhioni ship has approached this station after so long.”

  The Salvager’s Plague.

  Ko-Fi