Hell Off-World

Amy trod out onto the barren, red dirt of the parallel dimension a second time, and looked around nervously. Mercifully, the monstrous bird Amy had fought with was nowhere to be seen. A herd of buffalo were standing nearby, with no grass to graze on, they simply stood motionless, staring at the trio as they passed. It was eerie how seeing a peaceful herbivore reduced to a rotting, hairless monstrosity was more sinister than seeing a monstrous predator in the same condition. They had significantly fewer eyes than skulls between them, and had the same pinpricks of yellow light the ostrich had had, where eyes were missing.

“Why is everything here all Star System of the Dead?” Amy asked, hoping in retrospect that pop culture references wouldn’t be too confusing for the squids.

The impression she found in her mind was that no one leaves the lower dimensions, which she found confusing.

“Okay, but while they’re here, they start decaying, until they look like them?” Amy asked.

Again, the squids transmitted the same notion to her mind. No one leaves.

“Right, but what does... Ohhh... You mean no one leaves ever? Not even by dying?” It suddenly occurred to Amy that, although the wound in her side hurt like hell, she hadn’t felt faint or woozy, despite seeming to have lost a bucket’s worth of blood to the formally white shirt wrapped around her waist. “So what happens if... you know... you get really messed up?” She asked, dreading the answer.

Sure enough, Amy grimaced in disgust as one of the squids pointed to the edge of the herd, at what looked like roadkill. It look a few seconds for Amy to realise that it had once been an alien buffalo. It was almost completely flat and barely had a third of its skin left. The lacerations in what was left of it led Amy to believe it had been torn apart by an ostrich. The most gruesome thing of all though, was that its legs were still writhing, desperately dragging the carcass towards the rest of the herd. Amy hadn’t thought she could get any more grateful that she had won the fight with the predator when she first arrived.

“There’s still so much I don’t understand about all this.” Amy pointed out. “Who are you? What happened to your city? What was in that flesh cocoon? Why am I in so much danger? How come there are more dimensions here than in most places? Oh yeah, and am I going to be trapped here for all eternity?”

Amy was being semi-ironic with her bombardment of questions, not that she wouldn’t have very much liked answers to them all, in reverse order. She massaged her temple, having a pair of squid in her brain was beginning to give her a headache. They told her that they would answer all of her questions, but the two of them couldn’t do it alone.

As the trio crossed the crimson expanse, Amy thought again of the crew of the Black Comet. Come morning, Atlas would tell the others they had seen her, but how would they react? Ideally, they would conclude that traversing through the portals turned people into ghosts, and consequentially, not recklessly follow her through, assuming they opened again, on the higher dimension. Alternatively, the crew might simply assume Atlas was hallucinating again, and their rescue mission would go on unabated.

As Amy wondered how long it would be until morning where the crew were, she noticed that the three suns shone from directly overhead, despite it being moments after nightfall on the other side. It occurred to her that time might not move while one was in the red dimension, until she remembered that the crew had all relocated in the time she spent fighting the ostrich, and later on, her visor had successfully predicted when sunset would be. Assuming it was still to be trusted, the suns would rise on the spire and the Comet in just under ten hours.

After almost an hour of walking, (Amy kept worriedly looking around for landmarks to find her way back with, since her visor’s navigating systems weren’t working), Amy began to feel a strange sensation, it crept up on her slowly, and got more and more intense, like walking towards a rock concert. It was neither a good nor bad feeling, but was beyond comparison to anything she had ever felt before. She would later discover it was the feeling one got when standing within range of around 800,000 beings with telepathic capabilities.

Although it seemed to be bare ground for miles around, Amy clutched her head, daunted by the overwhelming new experience. The squids came to a stop by a small, dead plant sprout, the withered branches of which reached just over Amy’s head. With no noticeable signal, (but obviously a telepathic one), a circle of dirt rose from the ground and slid aside, revealing a dark tunnel underneath, dimly lit by a flickering blue light. As the trap door lifted, the pressure in Amy’s head intensified and, mildly aware that the squids had returned their attention to her, Amy passed out.

-x-x-x-

Several hours later, Amy slowly awoke. The first thing she noticed was the display on her visor, it had detected the moment she lost consciousness and informed her that four hours and seventeen minutes had passed since then. The next thing she noticed was the flickering blue light coming from the spheres, looking like glass balls full of blue fire, imbedded in the walls. Coming a close third, Amy realised that the room she was in was packed shoulder to shoulder, or rather tentacle to tentacle, with squid people.

Not yet familiar with the distinguishing traits of individual squid people, Amy was unsure if the squids that had escorted her were in the room with her. The squids were of varying sizes, some spread out across the floor, to accommodate for their twelve feet length, and others the size of tennis balls, many of which had gathered around her curiously. She noticed that the smaller squid people didn’t have face masks, but nor did they seem to possess faces, she was unsure if that helped with the mystery of whether or not they occurred naturally.

The room she was in was dug out of soil, which was what made up every surface. There were three tunnels at the other end of the room, leading off into darkness. Amy noted that the tunnels themselves weren’t packed with squid people, which she realised, with some relief, meant that the squids had crammed into the room to see her, and the poor creatures didn’t spend their entire lives with such little personal space.

She noticed that the pounding onslaught of telepathic input had dulled slightly, then it occurred to her that it might have something to do with whatever was wrapped around her forehead. The feeling and deductive reasoning led Amy to conclude that it was a headdress made up of tentacles, which she guessed was dampening the squids’ connection with her. She lifted it for a second, experimentally, confirming her theory.

“Hi...” Amy said, nervously, almost a full minute after awakening and sitting upright.

Several of the young squids began to slither back and forwards more quickly, as though running around excitedly. One of the taller squids, with a face plate, slithered to the front of the crowd.

“You’re... You’re ready to answer my questions?” Amy could still hear the squids’ thoughts, she just needed to pay more attention. “Is that why I’m here? Do you all have the answers between you?”

The squids parted in unison, and the one which had approached her led her across the room and towards the tunnels, they had clearly been dug for the creatures to travel through, rather than remain stationary in, which meant, since they travelled by slithering on their fronts, the tunnels were barely three feet tall. Amy crouched down and followed the writhing tentacles of her guide, occasionally tapping the ground with her fingertips to keep her balance. The tunnel twisted four times, and Amy began to grow slightly claustrophobic, when she realised that she didn’t know how to get back to the surface, if she decided she wanted to. On each turn, she saw more of the squids, staring at her like they had never seen a primate before, which Amy had no reason to believe they had.

Eventually, Amy arrived at a room much bigger than the one she had woken up in. It was circular, with a high ceiling, and a floor which sloped downwards towards the centre. The glass spheres containing the blue fire were spaced neatly around the walls, and more blue flames burnt openly in three muddy fire pits spaced around the centre of the room.

Amy was reminded of an occasion when the Black Comet had needed engine repairs, which made them miss their connection with the Ark, and forced them to wait a week for the next one. While Monty had all too happily stayed behind with the ship, Theresa had taken Amy, Blaine and Atlas camping in a nearby mountain region, like her grandfather had done with her. Among the various survival techniques she had taught the three of them (mostly Amy and Blaine), was to never light a fire without proper ventilation, to avoid choking to death on smoke. When Amy was led to the centre of the room, though, she noticed that, not only did the flames produce no smoke whatsoever, they weren’t even warm.

While Amy was encouraged to stand in the centre of the room, between the three fire pits, dozens of squids began to emerge from the tunnels from which they had entered and filled the room, none of them crossing the circle around Amy, marked by the blue flames. Amy was getting a distinctly religious and/or cultist impression about the whole setup. She reminded herself that, not only could she sense their thoughts and intentions, but if they wanted to sacrifice her to some overseeing power, they probably could have done it while she was asleep.

Once the room was packed, a squid who may have been Amy’s guide (it was hard to distinguish between thoughts when the room was so full), encouraged Amy to take off her headdress briefly. Amy lifted her hands, feeling like her brain was boarding a rollercoaster. She lifted the ring of tentacles for only a split second before dropping it back with shock, but for Amy, time seemed to slow to a standstill as the entire history of the squids and the planet she was standing on flooded into her brain like water down a funnel. The flames seemed to grow longer and dance around the room, encompassing her in blue light, which faded to darkness, before the story of the squid people began.

-x-x-x-

Telepathy was the first and only way the squids had ever communicated, even dating back to their evolutionary ancestors, an amphibious, jellyfish-like race, living in a swamp seven galaxies away, as such, they had no use for proper nouns or names, so Amy’s nickname of ‘Squid People’ was as good as any. Travel between galaxies was still inconceivable for the United Galactic Empire, but the squids had developed commercial space travel before life on earth had even crawled out of the sea.

Even in the squids’ own galaxy, telepathy was as rare and unprecedented as it was in Amy’s. There wasn’t another species in the universe, known to either society, that could do it. As such, other races and societies weren’t as trusting of the squids as they were to other species which communicated in more familiar ways, sad as it was, since the squids’ chosen means of communication meant they were unable to lie. Because of how they were ostracised from other societies, the Squid Empire spread out across the stars while remaining racially stagnant, respecting other societies jurisdiction where peace could be made, and destroying their enemies where it couldn’t.

Planet A1948-Omicron, was to be the squids’ first home in earth’s galaxy. Even with their spectacular technology, traversing galaxies was an arduous process which still took hundreds of years, and required travellers to be placed in stasis. There would be no reliable means of contacting the rest of their empire, and no help would have come, even if they had known what had happened.

Just as Theresa’s crew had deduced, the squids’ ships had planted themselves in the ground like seeds, and homes had been built outwards as the society had expanded. It took some time, over a century in fact, but eventually... it woke up.

The Destroyer (named after the first scary word Amy could think of) didn’t exist. It was spoken of by various species known to the squids, around campfires, or in novels and movies intended to scare. Although no such thing had ever been seen, an underlying pattern could be seen, between various stories and myths, told by different societies at different points in time.

It was a colossal creature which soared through space, seeking a planet on which to lay its egg. Although there were countless plants and animals which could survive the vacuum of space, they simply floated in planets’ orbits or lived in asteroid belts, no real creature was capable of inter-planetary travel.

The Destroyer would land on a planet and find the biggest civilisation. Its black wings would eclipse the sun, and the shroud from its mouth would eradicate all plant life within hours. While its egg gestated, its spores would infect the locals, almost all of them would be unaffected, but very few, often fewer than a dozen, would begin to mutate, taking on aspects of the Destroyer, growing twice their usual size, sprouting leathery, black wings, and course fur, becoming its loyal Reapers.

While the egg was being produced, the Reapers would massacre their fellow locals. They never tired, never faltered, and never deterred after laying eyes on a victim. They didn’t exterminate the entire population though. Once a suitable number of victims had been produced, they would get to work on grotesquely mutilating their bodies. Under the watchful eye of the Destroyer, the Reapers would begin to craft a nest for the egg, out of the flesh of the locals, utterly oblivious to the remainder, who ran.

The egg would be carefully removed from the Destroyer’s mouth, scarcely bigger than a basketball at first, and the Reapers would ensnare it in tendrils of flesh, woven together, just as had been the case at the Spire. Once the egg was cradled, both it and the baby destroyer inside would begin to grow. The flesh nest would provide the egg with all the sustenance it would need to grow a body, but before it could hatch, the Destroyer needed a soul.

As it turned out, a soul couldn’t be simply transferred from one creature (such as the parent) to another, but nor could one be created, without great price, approximately 5,000,000 existing souls, in fact. So as the body was growing, the parent would provide its final service to its unborn child, and splinter the fabric of reality beneath the egg, so that the remaining populace could be held in an alternate dimension, until a suitable number of souls had been collected, at which point the egg would hatch, and the new Destroyer would be free.

A twist at the end of the story mentioned times when a Destroyer would land on planets without sentient life. When that happened, it would hide its egg away, and cover the planet with an adapted variation of its spore, where it would wait, for thousands of years after the Destroyer had died, for a sentient species to come along, where the new Reapers, and a surrogate parent Destroyer would be chosen, to complete its work. So whenever a family travelled to a new planet as a part of a colonisation crew, inevitably older siblings would taunt their juniors with warnings of any yearnings to go and look for eggs, or feelings of anger, for fear of being chosen to herald in a new generation of the Destroyer.

-x-x-x-

“Wow...” Amy whispered, she staggered backwards and was supported by a pair of tentacles on her shoulders. “So you colonised this planet and, a hundred years later, these Reapers showed up and started making a nest for that egg? So how long do we have before it drains all of our souls?”

The squids squirmed in discomfort and distress. The answer came from several of the group, and read clearly in Amy’s mind, they had been trapped for thousands of years, according to their scouts who monitored the other side of the portal, and kept track of the days as they ticked by, without end. It had been so long, that the Reapers had gone into hibernation, otherwise, they would have been ready to protect the egg. The entire colony would have lived on the other side, in the Reapers’ absence, but it had been discovered that, after falling to the lower dimensions, entities simply faded away after extended periods of time away from the Destroyer’s awaiting jaws.

“Why is it taking it so long?” Amy asked, both relieved that she wasn’t at risk of having her soul sucked out any second, and terrified that she was condemned to an eternity on a dead world full of monsters which could make her eternal life even worse with one angry peck.

As it turned out, Destroyers could live for thousands of years, but they weren’t immortal. The Reapers on Planet A1948-Omicron had been forced to build the monster’s nest, before the egg perished, even though they knew that the population was a woefully inadequate 800,000. The Destroyer surrogate and its reapers were smart though. With the nest, they had bought the egg a few more millennia, and now that the UGE had expanded to the planet, their plans could proceed. By now, the crews of the RG Wyvern and Star Skipper would be infected with a new batch of the Destroyer’s spores. Once the Ark arrived, they would carry them with them to the rest of the Empire, where new Reapers would awaken, and deliver more souls to their master, one ship at a time.

As it turned out though, Amy had thrown a wrench into the plan. The unborn Reaper could only absorb the souls of healthy, living, sentient life. When Amy had traversed the portal, with a gaping, fresh wound in her side, she had tainted it with her blood. Contrary to Theresa’s theory, nobody would enter the portal from the higher dimension ever again, until Amy was returned to the egg, and gorily sacrificed to it, which, even in her current state of immortality, the Reapers were perfectly able to do.

Amy got a brief, stomach-churning glimpse of the squids being rounded up in the spires by the monstrous reapers, grotesque masses of writhing, black tentacles, hanging onto surfaces with bony hands half-way down their enormous, bat-like wings. The squids were shoved through the portals like articles of clothing into a travel bag. After one squid was pushed through, a groan came from the egg, and the portals withered, as Amy had already known them to. The Reaper responsible let out a chilling shriek, and plunged its tentacle through the portal and dragged its victim back out, before holding it up to the egg and viciously tearing it apart, with a shower of blue blood. Once the poor squid died, the portals regained their colour and the veils regained their usual level of visibility.

Amy’s blood ran cold as she saw the pieces of squid rain to the ground. Then another thought occurred to her. “Why did you bring me here then!? If these things are coming for me, aren’t you all in danger?”

The squids had reasoned that the Reapers would be unable to occupy the hell dimension. No evidence had ever been seen to the contrary, plus, they were too large to fit through the portals.

“Either way, if the plan is just to hide here, then I’m putting you all in potential danger, leaving my friends to die, and the entire galaxy to be devoured by this monster! Even if the portals do stay closed forever, we can’t let those ships carry the spores off world.”

The squids stared at her. Amy sensed apathy, fear, and an acceptance of helplessness.

“I know things seem dire...” Amy sighed. “I’ve travelled all over the galaxy and I’ve never seen anything as messed up as what’s happening here... But if we do nothing, then things are definitely going to suck a lot, for everyone.”

Amy knew she would have sensed a surge of inspiration if one had occurred, but one hadn’t.

“You guys have actual telepathy!" She remarked, emphasising how incredible it was. “You can brainstorm ideas live! You can’t imagine what an advantage that gives you! And I know, you’ve had thousands of years to think this over... but you’ve never met me and my team. Now listen up.”

Putting all of her will power into output rather than input, Amy lifted her headdress. She uploaded all of the information about her, the rest of the crew, all of their conversations since landing, and, she suspected, a great deal of information about the UGE.

The squids stared at her in shock. Slowly, Amy sensed the hope she had been looking for. The motivation. The drive.

“How long until the Reapers wake up?” She asked.

They had no idea.

“Then we’d better move quickly.”