Volume 5: Gamma-20, Chapter 5.27

The first day watching the robots’ livestream was incredibly uneventful. They each got through an entire sector by themselves by the time we decided to call it quits, meaning it could take up to five days to search through everything if we continued at such a pace.

Gadow put the robots into sleep mode back in the compression system bay, having them lock the door to the storage area behind them just in case they disturbed anything during their search—always better to act cautiously now.

Over the next few days, we fell into a rather boring pattern, although things were happening to put me on edge. Occasionally, there were some power surges that dimmed the lights and caused

Jessipie-90

to vibrate strangely; Gadow said it was nothing to worry about as the ship went through various power generating cycles and something like that wasn’t out of the ordinary, although it seemed to happen with increasing frequency as the days passed. I was worried it might’ve been Gamma-20 responding to us searching for her nest, but Zyno was concerned it was the destabilized warp gate folding into itself and would soon turn into a full-blown singularity. No one seemed to be making any progress on any of their projects either; the robots couldn’t find any evidence of a Predazoan, Zyno restarted the work on his sensor from the beginning, and the engineers were growing increasingly frustrated as they seemed to have no idea how the warp reactor functioned at all after completely dismantling it.

Worst of all though I was missing Eve like crazy now; I found myself grinding my teeth occasionally, as though I was a junky and needed a fix. She was in my thoughts constantly, no surprise there, but there were times when I almost forgot she wasn’t with me and wanted to turn to her and tell her a joke or ask her opinion on something. Once I thought I saw something strange on the robot livestream and asked out loud what she thought it looked like, only to remember she wasn’t there when Reim asked who I was talking to.

It was definitely harder to sleep, and I found I was weirdly colder now without her snuggling me, and even when I was hanging out with Zyno or my other bunkmates, I felt so weirdly alone. It also felt like that awful void headache was returning, and I honestly wondered if I somehow was going through withdrawal without my Eve there with me.

I missed her so much it was ridiculous, like I couldn’t imagine how much longer I could go on without her. In cheesy romance movies the characters would talk about being complete with the other person, and I always used to laugh at the exaggeration, but now I honestly felt like a part of me was missing—like I was living without my heart; I felt strangely empty.

Perhaps it was because the work was so boring now, just staring at a computer screen and hoping we’d find proof of the Predazoan on board, but without something to distract me, I couldn’t help but fester in my dark thoughts.

Still, despite feeling like my own morale was draining away every day without Eve, I continued working for the sake of the crew.

When we went to the command center to start our fourth day of watching the robot livestreams, we were rather surprised by what greeted us.

“‘Unable to locate source’, what the hell does that mean?” I asked, looking at my monitor that was all black except for red text displaying the error message.

Gadow tapped away at his tablet, looking like he was growing frustrated, “I’m not sure, I can’t activate the robots remotely now.”

“Is it the robots or the cameras and monitors?” Fierra asked, leaning over to look what Gadow was doing.

Gadow shook his head, “The robots, I can’t access any of their programming, let alone start up the livestream.”

There was another rumbling power surge that caused the lights to flicker, and Reim couldn’t help but let out a little gasp.

I suddenly felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up, my danger sense making me think we weren’t just having technical problems.

“It’s Gamma-20, she must’ve done something to the robots, deactivated them before we could find her nest.” I insisted.

Gadow looked at me, “You’re sure?”

I shrugged, “I’m not sure about anything, but if we’ve disturbed her, we might’ve given her a reason to step over on our side of the ship.” I reasoned.

“Shit.” Gadow looked at Fierra, then back to me, “What do you think we should do now?”

Honestly, I had no fucking idea, and the fact these people thought I had any kind of answers for them made me all the more concerned for our survival—pinning their hopes on some random guy from planet dirt with no training and hardly any experience.

“I think I should meet up with my team, decide how best we should handle security from this point forward.” I told him.

Gadow nodded, “If you think that’s best, we’ll have everyone take a break from their projects until you all decide what to do about your monster.”

The problem was I had no idea what was best for the crew, I was just some stranded human in way over his head.

***

Gadow radioed ahead for the rest of my team to meet up in the command center, relieving his engineers for the time being.

Zyno, Durgo, Roote, Bryx and Willa all walked in with confused or curious expressions, clearly having no idea what this was about. They all took their seats around the table, looking up at the monitors displaying the error message.

“Find something from your robot investigations?” Bryx inquired.

I sighed and tilted my head back and forth, “Sort of.” I leaned forward on the table, “We think Gamma-20 disabled the other four robots now.”

“Dammit.” Zyno cursed as he hit his fist on the table.

I held my hands out in a presenting manner, “I’m seriously at a loss here for how we should continue, and honestly I’m a little worried we might’ve poked the beehive and given Gamma-20 a reason to leave her nest—to come after us in retaliation.” I admitted.

Durgo’s fingers clicked against the table as he drummed them rhythmically, “Were you able to narrow down her location at all?”

I shook my head, “No, in fact the robots were destroyed overnight while they were in sleep mode; we have no footage of what attacked them, nothing helpful for where they were attacked either.”

Roote looked over at Zyno, “How’s your sensor coming?”

Zyno sighed, “Without a biological sample from a Predazoan, I don’t think I’ll be able to get it working.”

Everyone at the table muttered or swore in their frustration, and I could see no one else really had any idea what to do; with such limited resources and not knowing where the enemy was holed up, we were just sitting ducks here waiting for Gamma-20 to make her move against us.

“There’s one other thing I think we should discuss…” I said delicately, looking over to Zyno.

He knew what I was getting at and just shrugged, leaving it up to me.

“We think the warp gate we used might be collapsing into a singularity.” I revealed.

People didn’t mutter their frustrations this time, instead they all loudly cursed the heavens for their horrible luck.

“You

knew

and you didn’t tell anyone?” Bryx pressed.

“How can you be so sure?” Gadow demanded.

In response, Zyno activated his tablet to display a hologram of the destabilized warp gate, now looking like a fractured mirror in the middle of space.

“We didn’t want people to panic until we were totally sure, but after reading the radiation readout, there’s only a 14% chance the gate will restabilize and close without folding into a singularity now.” Zyno explained.

“How long until it happens?” Fierra asked.

Zyno shook his head, “There’s no way we can properly predict a timeline due to the raw, chaotic nature of the void and dark matter radiation, but judging by how fast it’s been expanding and how large its energy pulses are, I can’t imagine it’ll remain stable for long.”

Gadow activated his own tablet to bring up a hologram of the entire system, doing some quick math on the device, “With our current distance from the gate, we’d have less than a cycle to escape the event horizon once it collapses into a singularity.”

Reim threw her hands up in exasperation, “Why the hell wouldn’t you warn us about this?”

I sighed, “Like we said, we didn’t want to cause a panic—didn’t want to disrupt people working on trying to fix the warp reactor that would get us out of this mess.” I reasoned.

Durgo crossed his arms and glowered at me, “I didn’t realize you had the authority to make those kinds of decisions.”

I glared back at him, “Zyno’s the one who discovered the issue and we made the judgment call together; if you wanted to make the leadership calls maybe you should’ve been keeping an eye on all the potential hazards like we were.”

Durgo’s voice modulator hissed and he puffed up like he was about to respond, but Bryx smacked a hand loudly on the table, taking everyone by surprise.

“Enough with the in-fighting.” He looked around the room, “The question remains what are we going to do from here? Gamma-20 might be preparing to retaliate against us, and we still can’t locate her on the ship. Plus, we’re also looking at an unavoidable, catastrophic event and the only way we can escape it is if we get

Jessipie-90

moving again.” Bryx took a deep breath to calm down, “So, what are we going to do now?”

Nobody had a response ready, no one had any idea what to do; we were all in the same boat here, our lives on the line, caught between a monster hiding on the ship and an impending catastrophe we couldn’t avoid. Who would ever be prepared to make the right operational decision when dealing with such insurmountable odds?

Finally, Durgo sat up straight in his chair, the first to make up his mind, “I say we focus all our efforts in finding Gamma-20; if the void singularity is going to destroy

Jessipie-90

, might as well complete our mission before we go down.” He insisted.

I rolled my eyes at that, “You can’t honestly expect us all to just throw our lives away for the sake of the fucking mission? Really?”

Durgo glared at me, “The Predazoans are a

universal

threat; this isn’t about following orders or even duty, this is about protecting the citizens of the Empire even if it costs us our lives.”

That sure sounded like the kind of pretty speech someone would say before they sacrificed themselves for their god and country, and even though I agreed innocent people should be protected from the Predazoans, I wasn’t about to just throw my life away to kill one when there were still so many out there.

Besides, thanks to the failsafe, if I died Eve would die, and I wasn’t about to let that happen.

“I can appreciate how…

motivated

you are to complete your mission, but I’m afraid my crew did

not

sign up for this contract with the idea they’d be sacrificing their lives to save anyone.” Gadow countered.

Reim nodded once, “Damn right.”

Zyno sighed, “If there’s no hope the warp reactor is going to be fixed, I say we start splitting our focus between repairing

Jessipie-90

and getting the emergency shuttle ready—just in case.”

“But what do we do about Gamma-20?” Roote asked.

Zyno just shrugged, “Hope beyond hope she’ll leave us alone after killing our robots?”

As though the universe was making a point to prove Zyno wrong, an alarm started blaring in the command center.

I let out an irritated groan, “Now what?”

Gadow pressed a button to answer a call coming in through the comms, “What’s going on?” He demanded.

All I could hear through the comms was screaming, crashing noises, and some high-pitched, otherworldly shrieks.

“It’s the monster drones, they’ve come out of the vents, they came to—” It sounded like Lummy, but she was cut off by some terrible screech and then static as the call dropped.

“Lummy? Lummy! What’s going on? Respond!” Gadow shouted, looking desperate.

The static subsided and I could hear Lummy again, “We were at the bar—all of us, and then suddenly they ripped out of the vents, snatched Vola up and took her away.” I heard Lummy sob, “There was so much blood!”

Lummy continued crying, and I heard someone grab the communicator from her, “We’re trying to regroup, heading to the cafeteria for now.” Brunt said.

“Stay there and we’ll come get you and decide on a plan from there.” Gadow ordered, then looked up at our team, obviously hoping for guidance.

For the soldiers on the team (including me) we were already up and ready with our weapons.

“Is there anywhere on

Jessipie-90

where you can activate internal shielding, a place you could all hunker down?” Bryx asked.

Gadow nodded quickly, “Yeah, here, the command center.”

“Why don’t you three stay here, we’ll grab the others and bring them here.” I reasoned.

Reim sat back down in her chair quickly, “Okay.” She said meekly.

Gadow shook his head, “No, I need to be there for my crew and make a decision on what to do next.” He turned to Fierra, “You stay here too, lock this place down, and only open it for the others if they’re in a group of at least four.”

Fierra moved forward to give him a quick kiss, “Be careful, please.”

Gadow nodded, looking determined, then turned to us, pulling out the pistol from his belt for the first time since I’d known him, “I’m ready.”

I turned to Zyno, “And you?”

Zyno smiled sheepishly, “Don’t want to, but I need to go with you with the hope I can get a living sample from one of the drones, complete my sensor if that’s still a possibility.”

I nodded once, “I’ll do everything in my power to get you one while it’s still alive.”

Bryx stepped forward, holding his heavy carbine rifle at the ready, “Alright, I’ll take point, let’s get on with it.”

Everyone confirmed they were ready, and we left the safety of the shielded command center, heading off to defend against Gamma-20’s retaliation against us.