“Vievel-” Halycen rested a hand on her cousin’s shoulder. She could feel his heartbeat pounding away as he knelt on the floor, pumping so quickly that she almost flinched from the beat. Her own heartbeat thundered a similar raucous sound, adrenaline crashing against her chest without any outlet. It was only years of study and focus that saved her from sitting paralysed as well; she had to keep moving, her momentum was all that sustained her. “Vievel, get up”. Staring out through the chamber threshold, Vievel hadn’t said a word in the moments since the Dwurkn had fled. He had to move. They both had to move. Halycen gripped his shoulder, pinching it unkindly.
“Ow-” Vievel yelped. He dipped his shoulder and pulled away from her. “Hallie, what are you-”
“Viev, get up”. It was just like him to leave her to lead.
There’s no time for sitting and thinking, Halycen thought. She took stock of the room as quickly as she could. Her flashlight was already retrieved and in her hand, her knapsack slung over her shoulder and her revolver holstered. Vievel muttered something under his breath, too muffled for Halycen to hear. He was still wearing his knapsack but everything else was missing. Frustration overpowering her instincts, Halycen grabbed Vievel by the arm and pulled him forward; he stumbled to his feet and snapped at her.
“Get off of me-”
“Viev, we have to leave,” Halycen said, firmer than she would’ve liked. Her heart thumped against her chest, so harshly she thought that it might escape. Halycen exhaled and tried to focus her attention elsewhere. Softening her tone as she spoke again, Halycen attempted to calm herself and to comfort her cousin. “We have to go. Get your things”. Vievel shot a sullen glare back at her as she spoke, but a spark of something else seemed to register. He nodded and adjusted his knapsack, slinging it over his shoulder. Halycen stepped over to the chamber threshold so she could peer through and into the ship beyond.
“It’s clear,” Halycen said, sweeping her flashlight across the corridor and parting the darkness. There were no shapes in the gloom, no shadows that begged to be seen as something else. A few openings on the opposite wall suggested other rooms in this part of the red ward, but as Halycen listened she heard nothing but the dull background humming of the ship.
“It took my gun”. Halycen turned around to see Vievel staring at the stone cabinets embedded into the wall. “It took... my gun,” he repeated flatly.
“Have you got everything else?” Halycen asked. When Vievel didn’t react Halycen strode over to him and grabbed him by the arm. The contact seemed to wake him, stirring Vievel from whatever distraction was dominating his thoughts. “Vievel-” At the sound of his name Vievel turned to look in Halycen’s direction. His eyes seemed to travel past her, fixating on nothing in particular. “Have you got your flashlight?” Vievel shook his head, glancing toward the stone basin where he’d grappled with the Dwurkn. Halycen followed his eyes until she spotted the tell-tale light of his dropped flashlight. It was damaged, from either the scuffle or the fall to the floor. A large crack cut across the exterior plastic cover, and the internal emitter barely seemed able to illuminate the immediate area.
Halycen pressed her own flashlight into Vievel’s hand.
‘Take that, you can be in charge of the light”. Vievel nodded, still staring off into the distance.
We can’t leave anything behind, Halycen thought, ticking off a mental checklist of everything they’d brought with them. She retrieved the damaged torch from the floor, feeling an ache in her side as she stooped down to grab it; as she stood she swept it across the room, scanning for anything else on the floor that they might have dropped or forgotten. The light didn’t even reach the chamber walls, seeming to diminish with every second spent; after a moment’s hesitation Halycen pulled her knapsack from her shoulder and deposited it inside, twisting the flashlight off as she did.
“Let’s go,” Halycen said, turning back to Vievel. “We need to get further into the ward”.
“Further?” Vievel asked, confused and wide-eyed. “You want to keep going?” His initial shock collapsed into indignance. “We can’t keep, we can’t-”
“Viev!” Halycen snapped. Whatever comforting tone she’d summoned before now felt elusive and impossible to grab. “We can’t go back the same way, the Advance were in that direction. If they heard your gunshot, anything…” Halycen let her words trailed off and hoped Vievel’s imagination would do the rest.
“It almost killed us”.
So? Your father will kill us.
“I know V but we have to go,” Halycen said, stressing the word.
“But-”
“I promise once we’re safe we can turn around”. As the words left her mouth Halycen wasn’t sure whether she believed them. They’d seen so little, found so little. It felt like a waste of the opportunity to leave so soon. Dwurkn ships were becoming fewer and farther between. Vievel seemed to trust the words though, trudging reluctantly out of the room. As she followed him her eyes grazed the blackened mark on the chamber threshold, where Vievel’s revolver had blasted the stone and made a new chip in the red rock.
A quiet melancholy settled over the pair as they left the small chamber and continued down the red ward’s central passage. They didn’t exchange words but they walked closer together, Vievel’s light keeping the breadth of the corridor illuminated whilst Halycen trained her weapon on the darkness. At each turn or twist, whenever some gloom-cloaked shape of the rock managed to present itself in a threatening manner, the two would freeze. Every time the ship would make a strange noise, or a shadow would hang a little loosely, the two would jump and try to make out the source. One particular sound made Vievel flinch so dramatically that Halycen burst out laughing, and that was enough. Their shared restlessness began to lessen, the journey only providing surprises of the same safe sort. A large stretch of the ward seemed barren and empty of rooms, no part of the passage sharing in the intersections that had so frequently decorated the previous charcoal-black corridor. After a few minutes more the ward again began to be populated by the carved archways, each leading into their own distinct small rooms. Halycen stepped closer to the first that rose up on their left, taking the opportunity to peer through. Looking inside she was unnerved to notice that it was almost a picture-perfect copy of the chamber in which they’d been ambushed. Stone cabinets on the north wall, a sloping roof, stone basins with adjacent metal tables; it was as though the room had been duplicated in its entirety and transported further up the red ward. Three times more Halycen peered past the new thresholds, and three times more she was stunned to notice that each room was identical. A series of indistinguishable recovery rooms.
“That thing,” Vievel said, as Halycen turned away from the fourth chamber. His breathing sounded uneven and he drew ragged breaths in between his words. “It… it ran away, didn’t it?” he asked. Halycen nodded, glancing uneasily at her cousin, unsure of what to say. The Dwurkn’s flight had been weighing on her mind as well.
It ran away. Dwurkn didn’t flee. Dwurkn were bred, quite literally born and engineered to fight and war for what they wanted; born, cloned - Dwurka took their first breaths in vats, programmed from before birth to hate Aælfir, to fight and to kill. They all looked the same and they all thought the same. It would’ve felt ludicrous to even consider a cowardly or merciful Dwurkn, yet she’d seen one with her own eyes. They were supposed to be killers, all of them. They were killers. Everyone said so, all the stories and the warriors and... Halycen felt her head throb, both from trying to wrap her mind around the Dwurkn’s behaviour, and from her earlier collision with the ground.
“At least it wasn’t a hu-”
“Viev-don’t!” Halycen drew to a halt and spun around to face her cousin. “Don’t say that-” She stared at Vievel, glowering and daring him to continue. Vievel shrugged his shoulders.
“What? It’s just a word,” he said.
Andlátta bidja.
“It’s not a word, it’s a curse-” Halycen sniped. “You’ll bring them down on us”. As the word passed over her mind it made her hands tense up involuntarily. Her memory started to recall combat drills unbidden.
“You’re so superstitious,” Vievel mocked. He turned to carry on walking.
“You’re Dwurkabrained,” Halycen retorted. Feeling for once that Vievel had actually come out ahead, Halycen lapsed into a surly quiet.
Vievel’s stupid obsession is going to get him killed. It was one thing to hunt Dwurka, to raid for their salvage. It was suicidal to think you could steal from a- you-know and survive.
The red ward shrunk as the two continued, the corridor drawing narrower, and as it did the pair were soon forced to walk in sequence again. Vievel walked ahead of her, his light occasionally dazzling Halycen as he turned to check she was still behind him. His movements were twitchy, but he seemed to be in better spirits since teasing her. Halycen sighed. As much as he frustrated her, she was glad for his company. As Vievel wheeled the light back in front of them, Halycen let herself relax a little. Her torso ached again, and she could feel her tunic beneath her armour sticking to her skin. A tremor, one that had been biding time since the Dwurkn attack, suddenly rocked her body; a feeling of helplessness, the same that she had felt when the Dwurkn had fallen atop her and pinned her to the ground, chilled her breath and soured her thoughts.
I should’ve thought that through, Halycen chided herself. If I had been alone- the thought hung unfinished for a moment before she pushed it away. She hadn’t been alone, it didn’t make sense to dwell on it. Still, a bitter taste hung over her mistake. It was hardly cadet behaviour. Do better, she silently resolved. Be better.
A noise from further inside the ship suddenly shook the corridor, a crunching grating sound so monstrous that for a moment it made Halycen imagine that the ship was digesting something deep within it. The sound echoed along the internal maze of walls and corridors for a few seconds after it ended, a fearsome death rattle that shook the ship.
“What was that?” Vievel asked. His voice was alert and worried. “Why is everything quiet now?” The dull background humming of the ship had vanished, and with it so had the gentle breeze that Halycen had taken for granted. In its absence was just silence and stale air. She could hear naught but the faint clipping of their metal boots upon stone, and she could feel nothing at all.
“It’s just the backup generator kicking in. Give it a moment,” Halycen lied.
It was most certainly not the backup generator kicking in, she thought. It was the backup generator dying. The oxygen field and gravity stabilisers would drop out the second their internal batteries ran dry, which could be hours from now, or it could be-
A second noise echoed through the walls of the red ward; the sound of a series of unseen large turbines beginning to spin up and heave themselves to life, accompanied by a rushing of air throughout the corridor. Vievel and Halycen drew to a halt, standing nearby one of the walls from which the noise seemed to be emanating.
“See?” Halycen said. She paused, cautiously waiting in case the sound suddenly stopped. “It’s okay”. The noise continued, tapering off until it became the same dull humming that had been present before.
“Right,” Vievel replied, nodding. He smiled, relief palpable upon him, before his face suddenly shifted back to the same defeated mask he had been wearing before. Before Halycen could ask if he was alright Vievel strode away, continuing down the corridor.
Perhaps we should cut this expedition short. The ship was already dying. If the generator was struggling, before its time, then the Dwurkn frigate might be closer to the junkyard than she had previously thought.
As Vievel paused beside a chamber door-arch, Halycen glanced behind them. With the light turned ahead and facing down the red ward’s corridor Halycen could make out little, the darkness swallowed everything.
Good, she thought. There were no lights in the darkness behind them, not even tell-tale distant lights that would suggest someone had heard Vievel’s gunshot.
“Hallie!” Vievel whispered excitedly. “Look in here”. Halycen stepped over to the door-arch beside Vievel. Inside it was much the same as the chambers before, but where the others had been devoid of anything bar furniture this room was covered in tools, debris, and possible salvage. Halycen cast a second quick glance over her shoulder, inspecting the darkness one last time, before stepping inside.
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