Beyond Light

The Recovered Footages.

John and his team left the Eden called Vita Nova and returned to the Beyond Light. Without losing any time, they moved to the Engineering Room located at the bottom of the first and second decks. That was the place where the EPAL of the ship —codenamed Cosmic Lynx— was installed. John himself had not seen it more than twice ever since he got aboard.

And so they arrived. The Engineering Room was a wide and tall as two decks, where metallic platforms and ladders crammed the walls and edges. People with yellow helmets moved in and by, working on their holopads, operating various mechanisms installed across the beamed structure, or moving tanks aboard Quokkas. It was a calm day, and they didn’t seem to be taking things without ease.

The middle was free from any personnel: it was where the EPAL was installed and isolated, separated by layers of security meshes over protective layers of glass, and locked hatches. Tall as 20 meters and wide as long as 50, the engine’s outer appearance was a multiple series of cylinders that reached the wall at the bottom of the room.

Surrounded by various conducts, wires, and giant pipes that extended into hundreds of smaller ones, a whole mechanical spiderweb was distributed all across the wall behind. Multiple lights, fans, and other sensors were installed around it.

John looked at the bottom, which was a depression into the floor. There were a series of two meters wide cubes perforated by blue lights and covered by thousands of cables, sensors, and an ionized field. Those were the fission-fusion Vega-Mako generators, which supplied energy to the EPAL, and most of the ship’s systems as well.

“An impressive piece of engineering, isn’t it?” said Derek, putting off his nightingale helmet. John, Katiya, and Heinrich did the same. They had not even passed to the dressing rooms on the armory to take their armors off.

“Gotta say our engineers shined out this time,” said Doctor Winslow. “last time I saw an engine this big I was attending a whole dozen of workers suffering from radiation poisoning and third-grade burns.”

“Let’s hope it works optimally and we don’t end up under your care, then,” mocked John. “I don’t know what would be worse.”

“Oh, c’mon, pup. Doctor Winslow’s the most caring veterinarian you all could wish for,” Heinrich chuckled with malice.

John swirled his eyes with a grin. He had developed the habit of teasing with him, but truth was that he respected the medchief. He had not been assigned to the Beyond Light for nothing. Behind his controversial conduct history and a completed sentence of six years, he was one of the most adept medics the INSU had seen.

Starting his education at a late age of 24 years old during a government rehabilitation program, the man’s skills for medicine and anatomy didn’t take long to shine. Serving as a decorated field doctor and paramedic, propaganda about his —successful story of personal self-transformation— was not unexpected. The INSU’s justice department loved to use him to claim that they could rehabilitate criminals into a decent, productive citizen life.

“Loads of bullshit,” the Medbay Chief always said when asked. “just because I found something more interesting to do and I happened to be good at it doesn’t mean you can turn the old crows into goodies. Some of us just won’t adapt.”

They moved through the working personnel and mechanisms of the bay until they arrived at Engineering Chief Arthur Wallace’s office. John put his hand on the identification panel next to the door. It beeped in confirmation, and the four crossed inside. It was a beige room with a round table in the middle, and lots of expositors and shelves filled with documents, certifications, tools, and protective equipment.

The Bridge’s and Main Lab’s crews were inside, alongside the Engineering Chief and Supervisor Bella Diaz. The balance icon of LIBRA shined on a screen in the corner. The obliged saluted to him, but all of them had the pale faces of having seen a ghost. Even Doctor Weiber wore a drip of concern on his square face of sharp gestures.

“Chief Wallace?" asked John. "I’ve heard you repaired the data modules we retrieved from the Eternity of Return. What have you found? Is there anything still visible?”

“Oh, yes, Commander,” the curly-haired man responded. “there’s something you need to watch. It’s horrible. Not much could be saved, but what we could rescue shows more than enough. Wait and see.”

He pressed a button of his desk’s holoprojector. A holographic screen was ejected, showing the horizontal views from a camera looking over a long wide corridor, just like the one John and his EVA team found when they got aboard the dreadnought's remains.

“Quick!” a voice yelled. Two crewmen in white and golden uniforms jogged through the diamond floor, lowering their heads and shooting their AM1 pistols against something out of view. They reached the end of the corridor and hid behind a flipped vending machine. Blue, dazzling beams whistled and passed over them.

“What the hell is that?” whispered Derek. “Doesn’t look like any common plasma or laser gun.”

“Sh,” Wallace hushed. “Keep watching.”

The navy men kept trading fire until a wall behind them exploded. The expansive wave sent them away to the other side of the cover. Stunned, they tried to crawl to their weapons, but two figures appeared from the left side of the corridor they were shooting.

“W-what the hell?!” cursed Doctor Winslow. “Stop it there!”

Chief Wallace did so, freezing the image where both creatures became discernible enough. John gulped his own saliva. Everyone looked at them with primitive, instinctive fear.

The monsters on the image had a humanoid stance albeit much more hunched. It was as if their whole bodies were covered by natural, dark green exoskeletons covered by dozens of spikes. Their bulky yet slim backs had a division in the middle, just like a beetle would to spread its wings. Their thick, spiked legs had long talons that made them look like they had backward knees, but their feet looked like the claws of a grasshopper.

They carried some strange weapons in their three-fingered hands. Their heads resembled the ones of hornets, except that theirs were dark green, didn't have antennae, and counted with at least three eyes on each side.

How big were they? They towered the tiny humans on their feet! Some 2.6 meters tall, and that with their hunched stance. They would likely not fit inside those corridors if they straightened up.

Katiya cursed something in Russian. Others traded whispers and exclamations of both surprise and concern. They all had wondered what aliens would look like, but none of them would have guessed that they looked like abominations pulled out from a horror movie.

Chief Wallace resumed the footage. Both giant insectoids approached the crewmen and took them by their feet. “Aaaaaaaaaaah!” one screamed and shot his pistol against the monster holding him.

A blue liquid splashed, but the alien just swept the damage away and continued plunging. The crewmen cried once again. The creatures didn’t care; they raised them with their claws like children would pick ragdolls, and sauntered back to the other side of the corridor. The footage ended.

"That blood," said Yui. "Commander, maybe that's what you found!"

“That’s all we could recover from two modules, Commander,” interrupted Chief Wallace. “there’s another footage from the last module. It's from the ship’s bridge. Let's watch.”

The Engineering Chief pressed a series of commands on his terminal, and the holoprojector shot a different image: the white and long bridge of the Eternity of Return. The crew inside looked like having survived a rough battle; some spilled blood through their noses and foreheads, and others looked to be panting for air.

Master Captain Jay Cortez appeared on camera, looking more stressed than Admiral Hopkins on a normal day. John saw someone else there too: Blair, sitting on his position next to the captain, not looking any less stressed. He knew his facial expressions very well.

“Captain!” a young woman of short hair cried from her position at the right. “I am detecting something. It’s approaching us! and… oh no…”

“What’s it, Lieutenant? ...Speak up!” Captain Cortez barked. He moved to her. Both mindlessly stared at the screen for a long moment, making everyone inside grow anxious and turn their heads to them.

“What’s going on, Captain?” asked Blair Star, getting no response. Captain Cortez then moved to the window ahead and stared another long moment at it.

“Captain? What’s going on?” the Pilot at the front demanded.

The image then changed to the outside cameras of the dreadnought: a colossal, dark object, similar to a tuna can or a hex nut appeared on the screen. In the middle of it, an elongated hexagon had eight red lights directly staring at the camera like the eyes of a spider.

Chief Wallace paused the image. A square of the information below put: unidentified object: Estimated length: 100.809 kilometers. Estimated height: 41.196 kilometers.

Everyone released silent yells. “Motheroffriggingwhat?!” exclaimed Mike. “Am I reading well?! Are you sure this footage isn’t corrupted?”

“As sure as my name is Arthur Douglas Wallace. This footage is the last one. It ends there. The Eternity of Return likely got decimated by that supercolossal goliath. May God save us from this one...”

Everyone’s faces paled. First those monstrous insectoids, and now that titanic colossal? 100 kilometers long?! What spaceship or station had that enormous size?!

John understood it. The most powerful warship ever built didn’t stand a chance. It got dwarfed in both size and power. He looked again at the screen. The red eyes of the giant looked directly into his soul with a chilling breeze that sang for death and damnation.

Were those insectoids with that colossal? Yui pointed it out. One of them bled blue. They didn’t see them killing those crewmen, though. It was clear they were the kidnappers, and it was clear now who obliterated the almighty Eternity of Return into a pile of scrap.

Mystery solved. They now knew what happened to the Eternity of Return. But they didn’t know exactly who and how, and much less the why. Nothing remained of the crew, and assuming they didn't kill them all and threw their bodies to other space, they had no idea where they could have taken them.

John’s head hurt. He thought those modules and footages would put into peace many of his doubts, but they only generated more morbid questions that needed to be solved. They could have accomplished what BLACKCAT was created for, but their mission was far from over in Hawking-616a.

Blair was still missing, and nothing guaranteed that if they returned to the Sol System, that colossal monster would not follow them. The Eternity of Return got obliterated! What chances did they have against a super monstrous titan like that?