Chapter 11 (Rough)

"Looks like you beat Rickter," Hadley snickered, and then spat. "You're a tough one, even for a Kaval." I stepped in front of Erk, proactively, but Hadley held up his hands suggesting of peace. "I have to follow up on this Rat's Nest thing. Neo Tech -- that's a battleship from Neo over there." He gestured in the general direction of the centre of the crater.
"You coward," Erk barked. "Back before, in the Underlow, you were talking about killing me. In front of Jade and all of these guys, now you're all business?"
My jaw dropped, and I looked at Hadley. "You were going to kill him?"
Hadley dropped his arms to his side in a loose shrug. "What can I tell you?" He gave Erk an intense stare. "I can't say what Rickter told Erk when I left. Us Unitans can get pretty worked up about this stuff after all."
"Wait, Unitan?" I broke in.
Erk looked at me and nodded. "After we got separated I found out they're all here as liaisons to the Peacekeepers."
"That's right," Hadley interrupted. "Remember what my partner told you?"
Hadley locked eyes with Erk for awhile, before Erk finally responded with a nod. "Yeah, I remember."
"Good."
"I also remember she said she was your superior," Erk retorted. "Not your partner."
Erk's comment twisted something in Hadley, whose controlled demeanor contorted. "Okay," a laconic reply. "We're good then."
Finnic cleared his throat, "Almost good, you mean."
Hadley smirked. "Well, yeah it's the damnedest thing," he chuckled. "As it happens, that ship was left here in a heightened state of lockdown. It's been leaking energy from its core for the last couple hundred years." He paused to gesture around him. "Nothing these dampeners can't handle though."
"What?" I cut in. "How can you possibly know that?"
"Let me continue?"
I shrugged.
"Anyway, this is all in the public record," Hadley paused again, contemplatively. "The lockdown lowered stages, sometime recently. As in the last day, recently." He looked in the direction of the crater's centre, with a nudging twist of his neck. "Won't be long till someone else comes poking around down here -- namely city interest groups. Peacekeepers. City guard. The military. We won't get another chance to--"
His monologue was cut short by my singular, unimpressed clap. "And why should we believe, or trust you?"
"Look kiddo--" he stopped short, analyzing my glare. "Jade… you don't really have a choice."
I felt a hand grab carefully at my forearm.
I turned slightly, looking out of the corner of my eye to see that it was Erk.
"It's okay Jade," Erk parlayed. "It's not safe here anyway." He nodded off down the corridor, past Hadley, Finnic and the others. Their heads all turned cautiously with his nod, and locked onto a crystalline tentacle slithering off between two power blocks.
Hadley looked back at me with a pleading gesture, and I offered a resigned shrug in response. The Unitan man pointed off to a catwalk not too far from where we were. With acuity of senses, Erk offered to take point and I followed behind, not trusting anyone else to watch his back.

We made it to the catwalk without incidence, boosting one another atop a nearby dampener platform, and then again to the platform above. The crystalline latticenet along our path were no longer dormant, but mostly retreated off of the walkway when the vibrations of our footsteps came too close. There were a plethora of maturing husks, grown into the surfaces of power blocks along the way, but no signs of anything having hatched recently.
As we neared the ship, anxiety gradually swelled in Erk. I could see it in his tightening muscles, and momentary jerks when he thought he heard something. His ears moving around uneasily, trying to discern detail from our surroundings.
As for the ship, its looming presence grew in magnitude as we trudged closer. It was a long and narrow structure, with rounded edges.
To the rear of the fuselage, a stylized 'The Infiltrator' was written in cursive graffiti, with a manufacturer logo underneath in plain blocky beveled font, 'NESTERCORP'. Streaks of indentation and scorch marks from a battle long fought marred much of the text, in such a way that it was disfigured and uncomfortable to read in its entirety, but a few blocks of unscathed lettering popped out through the rest of the mess. 'The -- rat -- NEST.'
"Cute," Hadley joked, coming up beside me from the rear.
We approached a more complex system of catwalks, which surrounded multiple reception towers closer to the ship. A series of steps, which we climbed four flights of before coming to a long metal-mesh dock, with several unused platform extensions. Clearly it had been intended to dock multiple ships at a time, had there not been such a large ship taking up the entire space. We approached the platform that led up to the ship, climbing a ladder up to a more sturdy loading bay portal, built into a reception tower. In the loading bay, I stepped out to the edge of the portal, and easily gathered that the disembarkment gurney had long been clamped to the ship.
We all stood before the entrance to the ship, but the opaque orange shimmer of a kinetic shield barred our path of entry.
"I thought you said it wasn't in heightened lockdown?" I turned to Hadley.
He nodded. "Believe it or not, that kinetic shield is in a lower stage of lockdown," he stepped forward to get a better look at the force field with me. "I don't think we'll be able to get through without some heavy duty extraction equipment.” He reached forward and laid his hand flat on the kinetic shield. "It feels like a solid surface… it'll be harder to cut through than graphene."
"What do you think Er--" I looked back at Erk, whose tenseness had completely evaporated. He stood with arms at his side, and stared at the kinetic shield with pupils contracted even further from the Kavalli norm, to the size of a pinhole. "Erk, are you alright."
Not responding with gesture, he opened his mouth to speak. "The orange light… it's so bright," he paused with a visible gulp. "But it doesn't hurt to look at."
Finnic stepped over to Erk and motioned to pat his shoulder with consoling empathy, but the moment he rested his hand on Erk's shoulder, the Kavalli pupils dilated back to a neutral state. Erk jumped on his heels, turning to punch Finnic hard with the shock of surprise. The tech junkie was laid out flat, landing hard on his back, and stumbling to get back to his feet.
The other stalkers grabbed their weapons, but Hadley waived them off. "No weapons. Just me and him."
"You won't stop me from reaching the light!" Erk snarled, crouching animal-like, with swelling veins and musculature. He leapt through the air, sinking his claws into the bigger man's chest. Reeling back for a punch, he flexed his triceps as arm straightened into Hadley's jaw. The man stumbled, and Erk pulled back for another strike, but this time Hadley caught his frenzied fist, and returned fire with a hammering blow of his own onto Erk's cheek. Erk collapsed to the ground in front of the Unitan soldier, and shakily attempted to stand up. The large man didn't allow it, though, pushing Erk back down to the ground with the heel of his boot pressed into the back of his prized defeat.
"No!" I yelled, pulling the Carbex out of my pocket and pointing it at Hadley's head. He lifted his arms up to his side and took a couple of steps back, meanwhile the rattle of guns from the other four men warned me of an unwinnable standoff.
"This isn't necessary," Hadley attempted to wind down the situation. "He attacked me, it was self defence."
I kept the shakey barrel pointed on the man, and shook my head with uncertainty. In a way I knew he was right. Erk was a spontaneous fighter, but something different overcame him in that moment. Something instinctive, that had lulled him into a trance-like frenzy. "Just let me think," I stalled, and Hadley nodded. All the while, Erk was pulling himself back up, and shaking his head. "Erk, are you alright?"
"Y-yeah…" he trailed off, as he regained his footing. "Don't wanna fight… just need answers." He stood straight and turned to face me. I turned my head and we locked eyes. Staring into each other's eyes Erk's expression changed to a blank face, he looked at me as if caught by surprise, and an uneasy feeling flushed my face. “Your eyes are… they’re green.”
I lowered the gun, and Hadley lowered his arms, also waiving the others to lower their guns. All the while, Erk stared at me like a zombie, and I snapped my fingers in his face. "Erk!"
He started, and shook his head into his hands with a gasp. "D****t… I was looking at your eyes… it's this place, and that light."
"What light Erk? The everlight?"
"No," he swallowed hard. "It's so much brighter than that. It's coming from the ship. It's like its calling me. Like the ship is calling me." He looked over to the kinetic shield again, and started limping toward it. The stalkers responded by leveling their guns to him, but Hadley held up a hand gesturing them to hold their aim.
"Let's see what happens," Hadley commanded.
Erk stepped languidly closer to the force field, halting just in front of it and placing a hand flat on its surface. We all waited as the barrier rippled but nothing else of note seemed to happen.
"Enough of this," Hadley sighed, taking a step toward Erk.
And then, he stopped as the entire shield started to glow faintly as Erk's arm fell forward behind the barrier. The rest of the entranced Erk followed behind shortly, and continued limping towards the ship's entry hatch.
"Erk!" I shouted. "What about us?"
He turned around, startled. "Oh, right,” blinking. “Sorry I forgot you were all there." He placed his hand on the kinetic shield again and the glowing energy evaporated into nothingness.
The men stared confusedly, and Hadley was the first to step forward. I followed with the other four coming in just behind me. We joined Erk by the entry hatch.
Hadley tried to interact with the door's command panel, but his every attempt was rejected. "S**t!" He looked at Erk, predicting the same answer we were all guessing at. He gestured to the panel. "You wanna give it a try?"
Without hesitation, Erk planted an open palm on the panel. The hatch sighed with slight depressurization, then clicked open and slid away into the hatchway portice. A trail of lighting flickered to life inside the ship and along its floor, marking a passageway and offering soft lighting of the ship's interior.
All of us entered, except for one of the stalkers who was commanded by Hadley to keep a watch on the door.

The subtle lighting inside only marked a particular passage, while other corridors branched off into darkness. We made slow progress, unsure of where we were going.
Before long, growth of a hibernating crystalline lattice colony took shape -- and it was everywhere. Whole sections of passageway walls and floor were completely overgrown in spots like a cave of living crystal.
"How do you figure it got in?" I asked openly.
"Given a few centuries,” Hadley frowned. “These things could find a small weak point in the shield network… just takes one spore in an energy rich environment to start a colony."
Then Erk. "Or it got in before the shield went up."
I looked down one of the dark corridors, not able to discern much detail. "Maybe we should check some of these dark spots?"
Erk shook his head. "The light wants us to go this way."
I groaned. "Erk, I don't get what's going on with you," my friend looked back at me and offered an empathetic frown. But instead of answering, he turned his gaze back to the path.
As we trekked along the illuminated pathway, we crossed more dark areas, at times, different members of our group thought shadows were bolting around from deeper in the darkness. Or Occasionally one of us word hear sounds of rattling, or hissing -- and less often more than one person would hear the same creeping sounds at the same time. But the disturbances never seemed to distract Erk, who was increasingly drawn toward whatever we would find at the end of the path. Sometimes he'd feel like he were miles away, unaware that any of us were beside him.

Finally we came to a closed door, that featuring a panel not unlike the one that we came in from. However, the door differed in that crystalline structures were growing around the extremity.

Erk stared at the door, clearly wanting in.

"Should we open it?" I looked around asking openly.

Finnic was the first to speak up in reply, "I don't feel too hot about the crystals here." He looked back over his shoulder, down the path we just traversed. "We might alert whatever we kept hearing back there too."

"We need to go forward," Hadley started, clearing his throat in preparation for an explanation of command.

But his explanation never came. Without a word, Erk lifted his hand onto the door panel, and the structure slid off into the hatchway portal, snapping crystalline lattice roots without apology. The surrounding lattice started to pulse purple and red, and the echo of loud rattling from numerous sources could be heard coming from back toward the entrance.

We cautiously stepped through the portal, and were caught by surprise when the sound of gunfire echoed down the hall along with frenzied growls and hisses, cut silent by a short scream. And then silence.

The hired muscle looked at Hadley, who shrugged. "Hey, now you're all going to make double what you were promised."

Begrudgingly, we all followed through the door after Erk and Hadley, who seemed to be the only eager ones to march forward into the unseen. The corridor was unlit, but a light source in the chamber beyond revealed a substantial opening. As we walked into the open space, an orange glowing orb appeared hovering in a cylindrical antigrav field generator. Beside it was another similar generator, however, completely unoccupied.

Erk stepped slowly toward the orb -- which was about a foot in diameter. Jogging up beside him I grabbed his shoulder but he continued walking, unresponsive. "Erk?" I asked, again with no response. I shook him harder and raised my voice "Erk!" And the tinge of awareness sprouted into him.

He turned and smiled at me, "Oh, hey Jade." And promptly turned back to face the Orb with a blank stare.

Finally Hadley joined us, and pulled Erk back by the other shoulder, as we neared the orb. "I think that's enough, Kaval," he yanked Erk back with force, and the young Kaval tensed his muscles again, and struggled.

The two traded a few swipes and blows, before each taking a couple steps back and bracing for another tussle. I took the brief reprieve to run up to the growling Kaval. "Erk!" I yelled in his face, but he seemed to be looking right through me with what I could only describe as carnal hatred, his nose scrunched, eyebrows slanted and lips quivering with a growling mouth.

I pulled back and slapped him, not knowing how he would react in that moment. I braced myself, squinting my eyes in anticipation for a return swing.

But instead, "Jade…." I focused my eyes on him, and he seemed to be struggling with a confused look on his face. His expression congealed into awareness as he focused on my eyes. "Jade…."

"Erk, are you alright?" we stood in the quiet, the orb's glow covering us with a soft drape of light. But the silence was cut short by hissing, this time not as far off as before, everyone's attention was grabbed by the doorway, and the four armed men leveled firearms at the entrance. I joined them, lifting the Carbex in both hands, and staring down the sights, while Erk stood uselessly unarmed and only half awake.

The hissing grew in amplitude, sounding as if only just beyond the doorway. A tentacle shot out of the darkness, and we all opened fire. It wrapped around the leg of one of Finnic's remaining companions and tugging him off his feet, and went limp as it was cut short by gun fire. We stopped firing, and waited in silence for the monster to reveal itself. The thug grabbed his gun and scrambled to stand up, but a piercing feline roar startled him into fumbling his weapon. He turned around on his back, gun projecting from the hip, just as a quadrupedal crystalline creature jumped out of the darkness.

The creature's jagged crystal claws dug into the man's chest on impact. It hunched his back as Finnic and the other thug opened fire, most shots ricocheting, but a few making purchase with spurts of blue blood between gaps in the crystal hide. Rattling echoed from out of the creature's chest, as it craned its neck over it's prey. It's maw peeled open with three jaws covered in serrated teeth, and it plunged its mouth over the head of the man. There was a momentary muffled scream followed by crunching and gurgling, while blood misted around the feasting creatures mouth.

Taken aback, I shook myself back into calm. Taking the hilt of the graphene dagger in my palm, I ripped it off of my mag belt and flung it at the creature. It seemed to fly through the air in slow motion, turning over itself until it ripped through the creature's craned neck with ease, gliding straight up it's back, before coming to stop lodged in the floor behind. The monster collapsed on top of the remnants of the man underneath.

We all paused, momentarily motionless, waiting to see if the creature were truly dead. A single bubble of blood, grew and popped in the corner of two of its jaws, but nothing stirred. I felt tension drop as people exhaled and started to point their guns at the floor.

Then another tentacle. This one came whipped out of silence, wrapping around Finnic's plasma frag rifle. The man beside him leveled his railgun on the tentacle, sectioning it. The remaining length of tentacle withdrew back into the silent darkness, and another beast like the first trotted into the room, joined momentarily by a second.

The two men began to open fire relentlessly. I turned to look at Erk, whose attention was being drawn back to the orb. Then turning my attention to Hadley, who was already standing next to the spherical object. He looked back at me and shrugged with a smile, bringing his hand up and resting it on the glowing orb.

A shockwave of orange energy shot out a pulse of energy and the two beasts shrivelled into dust, just as they were beginning to overwhelm Finnic, who since I had turned my attention away had been knocked over and was wrapped in tentacles coming out of the mouths of the creatures. He scrambled up to his feet, and looked at Hadley in surprise, then back down the corridor as more hissing and rattling echoed through.

Turning my immediate attention back to Hadley, I squinted as the orange glow of the sphere cranked up its luminosity, brightest in the area surrounding where Hadley's hand was resting on the orb. The glow seemed to be seeping into his hand, climbing slowly up his arm. I ran up to him, and saw that his eyes were glazed over and bloodshot, with the veins closest to his iris turning black. Looking back at his hand, I was shocked to see the same thing happening to the swelling blood vessels to the sphere. And then, there was another pulsing shockwave, accompanied by a brief humming, and then a roaring swirl of violent wind around the orb.

The wind picked ruffled my jacket and flung my braid about, whipping my bangs and forcing me to squint. I looked back at Hadley's eyes, and noticed he was bleeding from his eyelids. Then, from the darkness, another tentacle shot out this time grasping Hadley by the arm. But the orb released another shockwave, and the tentacle was immediately obliterated into dust.

The wind was growing in intensity with each passing moment. And with the intensity, the spread of orange glow increased its spread over Hadley's arm, the black blood vessels now reaching almost up to his elbow. With his trenchcoat whipping around in the gust, the shape of a plasma dagger's hilt caught my eye. I grabbed the hilt and pulled it off of his belt, extending the plasma beam immediately.

"Sorry," I yelled in the wind, examining the man's arm. Raising the dagger just below the elbow, but before the spread of the glow, I closed my eyes and plunged down with the weight of my shoulders and the beam sliced straight through. When I opened my eyes the chaos was still happening all around us. More creatures were filing into the room. Hadley stood in the same position as if nothing had happened -- blood oozing slowly from the cauterized cross section of flesh. And Erk was standing next to me, mesmerized by the orb.

I grabbed onto Erk by both shoulders and started shaking him. "Erk! We have to get out of here." Consciousness washed over his eyes as he looked at me.

"No," he responded laconically, and with a half smile. I looked at him with a pleading stare, but he looked away, back at the orb, and planted his hand firmly on its surface.

Another shockwave -- this one more sudden and severe than the last -- shot out of the orb, blasting Hadley and I off of our feet. Hadley collapsed beside me, his sectioned arm being flung somewhat further. Looking up at Finnic and his remaining friends, I was relieved to see crystalline beasts attacking them disintegrated I to dust. Throughout the room, lights flickered into an activate state, bringing the room into daylight levels of illumination. I stood up, feeling the throb of the bruises I had gotten earlier. I looked back down the hallway we had entered from, and felt relieved when I saw lighting down the corridor also flickering to life, and crystalline lattice shriveling into dust.

I looked back at Erk, and immediately noticed the wind had died down completely. Moments later, a kinetic shield bubbled around Erk and the Orb, this time it looked fully energized and sparkled, shining with orange refraction. Then, the entire room shook, and other doors in the chamber spontaneously slid open. The shaking increased into a violent rumbling.

I looked back at the amputated Hadley, who was keeled over and retching. Meanwhile Finnic and his companion stood alert, taking in the situation.

The rumbling continued to increase its intensity. I looked back at Erk, knowing that whatever he was doing was causing this. I strained to walk closer to the kinetic shield, and lifted a shaky hand to touch it, but recoiled with the spark of a shock.

It wasn't any good, but I gritted my teeth and narrowed my eyes, and attempted to force myself through regardless. The zap of electric current rushing through my hand forced the breath out of my lungs -- a feeling similar to wading in cold water.

"This is foolishness Jade," Hadley had at some point gathered himself, and was trying to talk sense into me. "That's a fully energized nanotech shield."

Despite his attempts at reason, I kept on, trying to force my way through. The sensation of current running through me took on a burning characteristic in my hand. I kept pushing, regardless. And with a jolt, my hand fell through the barrier.

"Impossible!" I heard Hadley exclaim.

I pushed through, forcing myself against the resistance until I had passed the shield in its entirety. The whole universe seemed in those few seconds to encompass only the orb, Erk, and myself. It was quiet, and calm.

Erk, stood motionless, and mesmerized with his hand calmly resting on the orb. I slowly reached up my hand, and rested it on top of his.