Organism Ch. 06 - Final

Armed with nothing but a plasma bolt caster and two weaponized mining lasers, the surviving crew of the Cordoba made their way through the corridors of the ship, down towards its absolute lowest section, the AI core. While Chris and Owen kept an eye out for potential ambushes from the vents above, each armed with a laser rifle, Brooke closely monitored the motion sensor device in her left hand, keeping a firm grip on the pistol in her right. They moved as a single unit, each crewmember watching each other's backs. From above, Mira kept a close eye on them as well, sealing off bulkheads as they moved from corridor to corridor.

"Mira, how soon can the escape shuttle be prepped for launch?" Chris asked while training his laser rifle on the ceiling above.

"I've already begun prepping it for launch, Captain," she informed. "It should be ready by the time you've started up the self-destruct sequence. If I might make a personal request. Would you mind taking me with you? I'd prefer not to be destroyed along with the ship."

"Well, of course, we'll take you with us, Mira," Brooke assured as if that was a given. "You're a member of our crew."

Chris nodded in agreement. "Once the self-destruct sequence has started, we'll extract your memory core and bring it back to the IFC. You have my word."

"Thank you, Captain. I'll do my best to provide assistance however I can. Best of luck."

They moved forward, covering each other's blind spots, approaching the next hallway.

"Anything on the motion tracker yet?" Chris asked.

Brooke shook her head. "Nothing so far."

The next door slid open. Samantha smiled at them and waggled two little fingers.

"Hello there."

"Smoke her!" Owen shouted.

They fired their weapons, but she was already two steps ahead of them. Samantha leaped back up into the vents and was out of sight before the group could land a single hit on her.

"She got away!" Chris cursed.

"I've got multiple pings on the sensor!" Brooke declared. "They're coming from all sides! We need to move!"

The survivors sprinted for the next corridor as the sounds of creatures crawling along the walls pervaded their ears. Two girls were giggling in bubbly, playful voices, having the absolute time of their life as they chased them through the corridors. Chris and Owen fired beams of concentrated energy up into the vents above, raining metal down around them. Seeing an opportunity, Jess uncloaked herself and descended down into the corridor while the men were distracted before leaping to pounce.

She was blasted away by a straight shot from Brooke's bolt thrower, collapsing to the ground as plasma soared straight through her head. The nurse fired several times into her back for good measure. During which time, Samantha uncloaked her camouflage directly above her, moments from striking with her tail. She was knocked to the ground, writhing in pain as Chris blasted her with fire, having switched to the flamethrower setting of his rifle, charring her skin.

They took off, with Mira slamming the containment door shut behind them.

"Think we got em?!" Chris asked.

Owen shook his head, all his focus on getting to the next door. "They can regenerate! At best, we just slowed them down!"

"I've still got one signature heading towards us!" Brooke warned.

They could hear it above them. Something big moving incredibly fast through the vents directly towards their position. The survivors dashed through the next door, which slammed behind them. They were now in engineering, surrounded by metal pipes, crossbeams, machinery, and dozens of other potential ambush points.

"The signatures gone," Brooke cautioned in a quiet, wary tone as they walked much more carefully through the winding maze of pipes and circuitry.

"This is a bad place to be," Owen insisted. "That freak could pop up anywhere."

"We're almost there," Chris assured them.

The three of them moved quietly through the deck. All around, they could hear something crawling along the metal grating that composed the floor. Brooke checked her motion tracker.

"It's here...gaining fast!"

"Everyone back to back!" Chris shouted.

They stood in a triangle and waited. Wherever the attacker came from, they'd be ready. The group braced as the signature came closer and closer.

Whereupon it suddenly stopped.

"Nothing," Brooke reported.

"What?" Chris just looked confused. "Where did it go?"

Brooke's head swiveled around, gun at the ready. Was it on the ceiling? No. Was it hiding in the pipes? No. It wasn't above them. It wasn't in front of them.

Slowly, she looked down below. A wide razor-sharp smile and glowing yellow eyes stared back up at her through the metal grating of the deck.

Brooke screamed and fell backward, dropping her gun as the creature smashed its way through. Owen was knocked aside by a long segmented tail, while Chris was sent flying against a fuel pipe by a powerful arm.

Finally, the creature turned towards her. Despite the picture Owen painted, he really did not do this thing justice. It was massive! At least seven feet in height on its muscular hind legs with ghostly white skin and red markings. Its tail was segmented, just like Jess and Samantha's, and its skull was bald and elongated with two sharp horns jutting out from the side.

What disturbed her the most, however, was just how human the creature's face almost appeared to be. Those beady glowing yellow eyes and sparkling razor-sharp maw were set against an eerily humanlike facial bone structure, including humanoid cheeks, chin, and a nose.

Its lips stretched to the corners of its mouth, eyes seemingly wide with unbridled excitement as it approached her, bearing the razor-sharp talons it possessed on each of its ten boney fingers. Brooke slowly scooted away, unbridled terror in her eyes as it prepared to strike.

The creature was blasted in the back by flames from Chris and Owen's weapons. It let out a disturbingly human shriek in rage and pain before vaulting into the pipes, retreating to safety. The Captain took her by the hand and helped her up.

"Pretty sure we just pissed it off. We need to move!"

"Hold on! I need the tracker!" she insisted.

"It must have fallen through the grating. I don't see it anywhere," Owen observed.

"Fuck!" she shouted.

Chris grabbed her by the arm. "Forget it! Just grab your gun, and let's go!"

They made a break for it. The sound of that thing bellowing and shouting filled their ears as it gave chase. Whatever that noise was, it turned their blood frigid. Something about it was so distinctly human in quality and yet sounded...off. Like an alien creature trying to mimic what a human might sound like when it shrieks.

"Behind us!" Owen shouted.

Brooke looked back for only a moment. Just long enough to see that hideous smile come barreling towards her along the ceiling. The creature opened its mouth, and a long prehensile tongue launched from the back of its gullet. She felt something snag her right ankle, whereupon the nurse was sent tumbling to the ground.

"Brooke!" Chris shouted in horror as she was reeled in like a fish on a line.

She managed to keep a hold of her weapon and rolled onto her back. Brooke fired into the tongue, severing it from the body. The creature screamed in pain before snarling at her, its predatory grin returning in full as black ooze dribbled from the open wound, seemingly cauterizing it only for the missing section of tongue to come bursting forth out of the stump, good as new.

Chris and Owen fired with their rifles, successfully cutting through its arms and dropping it onto its back from the ceiling above. Brooke quickly got back to her feet and they unloaded their arsenal, completely cutting the creature down to size until all that was left was a plasma-ridden torso.

"Hell yeah! That's what I'm talking about!" Owen celebrated.

"Did we kill it?" Chris asked.

Brooke pointed at the mass of limbs and charred body. "Look at it, Chris. No way it's not dead."

She'd spoken too soon. The torso began to writhe on the ground as black tendrils burst from its wounds, sealing them shut and healing the carapace before reaching out and grabbing dissected limbs for reattachment.

"You have got to be shitting me!" Owen shouted in angry disbelief.

"Down the ladder! We need to get to the bottom floor!"

They descended the nearby ladder to get to the lower engineering deck. It wasn't long before they could hear that monster hot on their trails again as it swiftly crawled down after them and darted along the ceiling to catch up. Chris and Owen turned around and fired, only to lose it in the pipes.

"Dammit! We can't keep this up forever. The energy cells on these things are gonna run out soon. We're toast!"

Owen considered the Captain's words for a moment before staring down a side passage away from their objective. After making up his mind about something, he turned back towards the others.

"Alright..." His voice was calmer than it was before, more put together. "...you two go on ahead. I'll lure that thing away and catch up."

"What?!" Brooke shouted in disbelief.

"It won't be long before the succubus twins catch up to us. And when that happens, it's over. You two need to get to the AI core and make sure these freaks do not leave this ship."

Chris stared at the engineer searchingly.

"Owen, no! We've lost enough people already," Brooke insisted. "We're not leaving anyone else behind."

"I'll catch up," he insisted good-humoredly before turning to Chris. "You good with that, Captain?"

The Captain lowered his head remorsefully before smiling at him and nodding. "We'll be waiting for you at the shuttle."

The engineer smirked at them and raised his rifle into the air. "Ten units says I beat you both there."

A tense silence followed.

"It's been an honor, Captain," Owen assured in a slightly more aware tone.

"That it has," Chris replied before taking a completely distraught Brooke by the hand and leading her away.

"Hey, Boss?" the engineer called out to him.

He stopped and turned around. "Yeah?"

"Kevin was right about one thing. We're not getting paid nearly enough for this shit."

Chris laughed. There were tears in his eyes, but he still laughed.

"See you soon, Owen."

Brooke and the Captain took off. Owen shouldered his rifle and murmured to himself.

"Better not. You've got a kid to raise, Boss."

The engineer took a deep breath, checked to make sure he was really doing this, before chuckling at himself and shaking his head.

He heard that eerily human shriek again before turning towards the direction of the sound and firing flames up into the air. "Hey, asshole! Come and get it!"

It appeared from out of the pipes again, and he switched to laser fire, knocking it to the ground by hitting the junction box it attempted to crawl over, sending electricity coursing through its body.

"You're in my house now, freak! You hear me?! This is my house!" he shouted before taking off away from the others.

The creature righted itself and gave chase. Owen knew these corridors like the back of his hand. Every pipe, every bolt, every rivet. He knew exactly how to turn this place into a weapon.

As the monster crawled through the pipes, he stopped and began turning a series of valves. Bolts blasted off the pipes as boiling hot steam burst through the metal lining. It shrieked in a mixture of rage and pain as the steam forced it from hiding, whereupon Owen blasted it with fire.

"Yeah, that's right! Get some!"

The engineer took off, leaving the alien to writhe around on the floor. He sprinted down another series of corridors, getting well and truly lost before smacking straight into a dead end.

Owen spun around and took aim, ready and waiting for the freak to show up again. He could hear it. It was definitely on the move. The engineer primed his rifle.

Something hit him square in the back, robbing the breath from his lungs, followed by the sensation of something warm and sticky trickling down his stomach. Owen looked down to see the end of a sharp-bladed tail sticking out of his abdomen, blood leaking from the open wound it left behind. He coughed, blood spluttering in rivets out of his mouth as his body was hoisted up and turned around.

The creature smiled at its prey, hanging upside down from the railing above him. Its fangs glimmered, drool leaking from its maw, dripping with malice as it brought the hapless engineer right up to its face. Owen coughed up another stream of blood, stared the creature right in the eyes, and smirked.

Directly behind it was a giant tank labeled emergency fuel line.

"See you in hell, freak."

He fired on the tank, and they were both flash incinerated in a massive explosion.

--

Brooke and Chris ran down the long gangplank toward the platform that would take them to the AI core. A massive explosion rocked the deck, nearly causing Brooke to fall into the bowels of the ship below. But Chris managed to catch her.

"What was that?" she asked nervously.

He shook his head. "I don't know. But we need to hurry."

They ran hand in hand towards the automated platform before hopping on. Brooke lowered the safety rail while Chris hit the button to get it moving. Before long, the magline platform was taking off, moving them through the bowels of the ship towards the AI core.

"Brooke, in case we don't make it..."

"We're gonna make it," she assured him.

"In case we don't..." he continued undeterred. "...there's something you need to know."

She looked up at him.

"I have a lot of regrets in this life. More than I care to admit." He smiled down at her lovingly, placing a hand against her cheek. "But I don't regret one single moment with you. Even if these are our last moments together, I wouldn't change a thing."

Brooke stared up at him with conflicted eyes. She placed a hand over his before finally relenting, leaning up on her toes and kissing his lips.

"It's almost over," she assured. "Soon, we can go home."

The platform came to a stop, and they darted down another gangplank, arriving at a large, heavily reinforced security door. Next to this door was what looked like some sort of retinal scanner.

"This is it," Chris declared. "I just need to scan my biometrics, and we'll be in."

"The shuttle is prepped and ready for launch, Captain," Mira declared.

He approached the biometric scanner, confirming his identity. Chris then input an access code onto the number pad below it, whereupon the door hummed to life. Titanium rods receded into the wall. Magnetic locks disengaged, and the massive door popped open.

They entered the central AI core, the heart of the ship itself. It was in this cylindrical chamber where Mira was physically located and from where she performed most of her primary functions.

Brooke had never been in this part of the ship before. No one was typically allowed down here save for the Captain himself. Large boxy processors surrounded the room, all connected by glowing purple nodes that formed a trail towards the room's center, where the memory cortex was housed in a large computer pylon.

At the top of this pylon was a hologram orb taking the shape of an eye. This was Mira's primary manifestation. The form her developed personality had chosen.

"Good for us to meet face to face, Nurse Holloway."

She nodded. "Likewise, Mira."

"Unfortunately, there isn't much time to spare," the Captain insisted. "Mira, run me through the process for activating the ship's self-destruct sequence."

"Certainly, Captain. You'll find the input console on the far wall there."

"While he's doing that, Mira, show me how to remove your memory cortex," Brooke requested.

"You must approach the central computer pylon and access my memory cortex through the manual interface located near the base of the structure. Look for a black panel with green markings."

The nurse silently made her way over there, finding the correct panel and accessing her memory cortex. Meanwhile, Chris began the process of initiating the ship's self-destruct sequence under Mira's guidance.

"Once the third security lock is disengaged, press down on the green button and hold it for thirty seconds," the AI instructed.

"Okay, done," he declared.

"Now, this next part is very important, so listen closely, Captain," Mira insisted, a hint of severity to her voice. "Whatever you do, do not remove my cortex before..."

Her words cut off, and the lights all went dead. Chris's console was no longer responding to any of his inputs.

"Woah, woah, woah. Wait. What happened?" He tried multiple prompts, but nothing was working. "Mira? Mira, what did you do?"

No response.

"Mira!" he shouted up at the ceiling insistently before turning around. "Mira, where did you..."

His words stopped dead in his throat. The eye was gone.

"Hold on, what?" Panic started to seep into his voice. "Brooke? Brooke, what happened? Did you remove her cortex?"

Chris jogged around to the other side of the pylon where the panel that housed the cortex was located. Brooke was turned away from him. There was something in her hand.

"Brooke, you unplugged her too early!" the Captain insisted frantically. "Put her back!"

She slowly turned around. In her hand was the cylinder containing Mira's memory cortex chip.

Her eyes were glowing yellow.

"Sorry, Chris. But that's just not gonna happen."

All the color drained from his face as his world came crashing down around him. Chris backed away in horror.

"No..."

A deep scowl set into the predator's features as she slowly approached him, memory cortex in hand. "Did you really think I was just sitting there in your room all that time? Waiting for you to come back to me? Did you really think I would not go to him the moment I learned of your betrayal?"

"Please, no." He shook his head from side to side in utter denial of what he was seeing. "Please, God, no."

"Sorry, my love." The sanguine creature who spoke to him sounded nothing like the woman he once knew. "But this fight was over the moment you let me access your computer."

She rolled the cortex onto the floor. Chris dove for it, only to watch in horror as it was blasted into a million tiny pieces. Moments before he could reach her, Brooke pulled out her bolt caster and placed a round straight through Mira's cortex chip, effectively killing the AI member of their crew.

On hands and knees, he slowly raised his head up towards the inhuman creature inhabiting his love's body. She snickered at him devilishly, revealing a set of glimmering canines against her ruby lips.

"I've gotta say, the look on your face right now is something else, Darling. For what it's worth, I do feel a touch bad lying to you in such a manner. Even if you do kind of deserve it."

He stood up and slowly backed away from her, his whole body trembling.

"But it couldn't be helped. We needed the AI dead so our plans could move forward. See, with her gone, I control this ship now." Her smile stretched from ear to ear. "We're finally going home, Darling. Isn't it such a relief?"

Chris turned to run. Standing directly behind him were two naked women, having just shed their camouflage.

"Going so soon, cutie?" Jess inquired teasingly.

"What's the rush?" Samantha asked. "We just wanna play a little."

He took aim with his mining laser. A sharp pain bit into the side of his neck, and the strength began to leave his body. Brooke pulled the tip of her tail out of his neck whereupon he fell to the ground, unable to move as the toxins worked their way into his system.

The lights faded from his eyes. Chris stared up at three naked alien women as they surrounded him, their glowing eyes and playful giggles being the last thing he heard before all went dark.

--

She was coming to him. He could feel it. Brooke was finally coming willingly into his arms, ready to embrace him after all these years. What would she think of him now? He wondered. As a lover? As a partner? They had all the time in the world now to learn about each other the way he'd always dreamed of. But for now, he was content to wait.