Quinquagesimus Tertius Gradus

Day 224, 0630: Waiting for people to finish singing “Happy Birthday” is the most awkward experience a human being can have. Though, I bet it will be considerably easier today. It’ll be the first time I hear my daughters sing together in over eight months. Then you can factor in my position 250 miles above the surface of the Earth. Oh, no… I think I’ll have Jarret make them sing it twice.

“Aw, thank you, sweeties!” Dixie Bennet beamed into the camera.

“Who is that?” A woman floating behind Dixie gasped. “Is that my beautiful nieces?” Irene popped into the camera’s view.

“Auntie Irie!” The girls shouted with glee. Jarret chuckled at their excitement. Dixie had the girls catch up for a moment, checking the time on her watch. She gave Jarret a glance, that glance, which he registered despite the digital separation between them.

“Alright, alright, ladies. When Aunt Irene shows up that’s our queue to leave,” Jarret laughed. “Say goodbye!” A chorus of goodbyes and I-love-you’s clogged the video stream.“Goodbye, dear adventurer,” Jarret chimed at the end, sending his wife a kiss. Dixie’s heart fluttered as the stream cut. She turned to Irene and floated with her into the wider terminal of the station.

“Surprise!” The rest of the crew shouted as she turned the corner. With digital candles wriggling on their touch screens, they began singing “Happy Birthday to You.” It was horribly out of tune, time, and even lyricism, as they each filled in Dixie’s name with a different nickname. Dixie blushed and shifted her eyes, her hands closing together at her waist. A plastic smile molded itself onto her lips. She bit her cheek until they were done. This was the absolute worst.

“Aw, well, like I told my daughters, ‘thank you, sweeties!’” The crew laughed. They took turns shaking Dixie’s hand or clapping her on the shoulder as they began to chatter, enjoying a break from work. Some of them had put together little gifts for Dixie, or written poems, or drawn pictures, and they shared them with her one at a time. Dixie couldn’t help becoming a little teary-eyed at the display, even if most of the gifts were corny or plain terrible, in an objective sense. “I appreciate you all so—”

The station shook. The astronauts couldn’t feel it, but they could see the walls vibrating. They could hear the metal groaning.

They scrambled to different monitors, windows, and equipment, each performing their own part in the procedure. A voice came over the intercom: “I’m trying to see what the hell that was. I’m thinking some debris, but stay frosty.”

“I don’t think this is debris…” it was Irene this time. She was staring out of a viewport.

Dixie and a handful of other astronauts crowded around the viewports on Irene’s wall. Beside the station, against the empty black of space, there loomed a massive, dark form. Purple light shimmered off of its hull—or, whatever it was—and arms had attached to the station, locking the two bodies together in Earth’s orbit. External spotlights rotated to illuminate the foreign vessel.

Dixie’s skin sheathed itself in sweat as a shiver ripped through her. She felt a monster breathing down her neck. In a way, there really was.

——

“Oh, hey! This is super cool!” Norman sang to the observation team. “The earthlings are space-faring already. They’ve got this big ugly can full of ‘em.”

“Super sweet!” Bertha replied. “Look at all this other nasty crap they’ve got around the planet. Do they still throw stuff out? What a shame to dress her in rags. She’s so pretty otherwise. That starlight has a certain je ne sais quoi against the shimmering blue dress of the starlet, no?”

“You’re right. Ah, they’ll treat her right eventually,” Norman fired off. He snapped an order, being not so interested in Bertha’s personified Earth with its shimmering blue dress of water. He would never tell her outright, but her grandiose prattling about planet-people always irked him. “Warren, go ahead and board. Let’s see what these critters are like. Oh, wait! Look there!” Norman focused in on the viewports of the earthling station. Bertha followed his gaze. They made out blurred images of earthling faces. “They’re quite…hm. Well, that’s not exactly what I was expecting. Get in there, Warren.”

——

Dixie stared at the vessel. The astronauts swarmed around her, each a flurry of activity. She, for her part, didn’t have much to do but observe. She put a hand to her mouth as a stream of liquid snaked out of the vessel, rippling in both the sunlight and artificial light. It resembled a simple liquid ejection stream at first, but when it twisted and coiled at the end, Dixie realized that it was more than that. It had oriented and reoriented itself toward the station, as if it was deciding a course of action. 

It shot forward. A loud, deep clunk reverberated through the terminal as it collided with the viewport. Dixie lurched backwards, striking her head on the wall.

——

“Oof! Ouch, that’s not a gap! It’s something hard. Super translucent though, obviously. I can’t get through it,” Warren reported to Norman, sheepish about his mistake. Adjusting his tactic, Warren spread his body thin over the station, searching for a hole or gap to enter. Fully extended, he started shifting over the body of the station. “They’ve really got this thing shut up tight. Is there any way they knew about us? Are they trying to keep us out?”

“I doubt it. We’re the first detectable things we’ve sent to this system. But, perhaps.” Norman said. “The Vroth are pretty chatty. Maybe they warned ‘em about us.” Bertha chuckled in agreement.

——

“They’re trying to breach the station!” Dixie shouted.

“They’re not responding to radio signals, Morse lights, or anything I can throw at them.” The voice on the intercom said.

Red lights began flashing inside the ship. A quiet, but certain, warning sound chirped at a constant interval.

“This is an order: Suit up. If these things breach the ship, you need to be ready for accidental jettison. Please remain calm,” the intercom warned, wavering. “The military is aware of the situation and is moving to intercept.”

Dixie scrambled for her suit. Not two pushes towards the room, the red lights swelled and the alarm blared, deafening and frantic. A horrific wind tore through Dixie’s hair and fingers.

——

“Woah! Is that them? They’re so small!” Bertha gawks at the flailing bodies floating away from the station. “It’s like they’re barely there.”

“I’m in!” Warren said. “It’s pretty impressive how quickly that gate closed up, though. These earthlings are serious business. It’s really warm in here, too, and super wet. Gross.”

“Excellent! Warren, explore around in there a bit. Bertha, go check out those earthlings and see if you can make them talk,” Norman said.

Bertha slipped out of the command room. She stretched her body away from the vessel, twisting toward the jettisoned bodies. She snatched them up by the feet. “They don’t look right, Norman. Like, they’re all bloated and blue and even nastier than the ones we saw from inside.”

“Interesting….Scan their molecules for cellular respiration.”

“Negative,” Bertha said a moment later. “No cellular respiration. What does this mean?”

“Hm. The earthlings are dead, Bertha. Warren, the earthlings can die. Try to be gentle, alright? Try not to poke any holes in their can. It would seem they don’t like that,” Norman said.

——

“They breached the station!” The voice on the intercom yelped. With the vacuum sealed, the alarms dampened enough for Dixie to hear and think. “Suits, now!”

Dixie shook her head. Pain emanated from her shoulders and hips. She had been thrown against a wall by the escaping atmosphere. Panic settling back in, she scrambled the rest of the way to her spacesuit. The legs slipped on first. With desperate haste, she snapped the other pieces together. Irene fell into her own suit beside Dixie, snapping hers into place even faster. Sylas and Bishop loaded into their suits in the same chamber as the women. Bishop entered last. He had a bandage wrapped around his head which was already soaked red. Thick, dark blood dripped down his face.

Dixie snapped her helmet down onto her suit. It flushed with dew as motors whirred. There was a round of snapping and clicking sounds, then a gush of air, and the dew disappeared as warm air flooded the suit. The clarity in her visor revealed a black mass wriggling around the chamber entrance.

Dixie screamed, shooting her arm out to Irene’s chest as if to protect her. They stumbled backwards as the tendril snaked through the air, glimmering with the same purple accents as the vessel from which it had emerged. The men’s spacesuits clamped into place, but Dixie heard their cursing shouts even over the mechanical clicks.

The alien shot forward, tangling around Sylas’ leg and waist, then pulled him to the center of the room. More of its mass appeared around the corner. It was massive; a clump of substance that ebbed mindlessly on its surface yet moved with intelligence and precision. It seemed to study Sylas as it curved around his body. Sylas was still and silent, veins bulging and threatening to burst through his skin. He was a creature then, a creature met by something so awesome and deadly that there was nothing his throat could think to scream nor beg.

——

“I’ve got one,” Warren said. “It’s a really still bugger. Soaking wet. Are you seeing this?”

“I see it, Warren,” Norman replied. “What’s that giant thing it’s in? Is that a cocoon or part of its body or something? The ones Bertha found didn’t have it. They’re way skinnier.”

“Uhm,” Warren trailed, “I’m not sure. I guess I could figure it out.”

“Please, if you don’t mind. I’m curious.”

——

“Sylas… just don’t move… okay… it’ll be alright…” Dixie whispered more for her own sake than Sylas’. She inched away from Sylas and the wriggling mass, pressing Irene back with her. Stunned, but recovering, Bishop slowly continued piecing his spacesuit together.

A second tentacle flashed from the alien and swept through Sylas’ waist. His legs twirled away with a spray of blood and a shriek. The tendril carved upward through an arm. Another cloud of blood burst into the room. With each heartbeat, a gush of blood spurted from the holes in Sylas’ body, slathering the floor and wall with red. The pink fog of blood that didn’t reach a surface bubbled through the air. Irene screamed. Sylas’ blood misted her visor, Dixie’s visor, and Bishop’s face, which had otherwise drained of color.

Sylas’ shriek withered as his heart ejected his body’s blood. It lost its human quality before it ceased. This most haunting moment of the scream, when it was no longer conscious, but was instead reduced, much like Sylas himself, to a naturalistic consequence of the shock imparted to his nervous system, echoed through the chamber long after his death. The shriek halted when the alien cut through his collarbone to his hip, but the echo remained, joined by the final vestiges of his curdling voice as it trailed into a trickling gasp. His organs spilled out and unraveled to span the entire length of the chamber, mushing into the walls of the station with wet, spongy sounds.

Bishop vomited, adding his bile to the slush of the room, then snapped his helmet into place. Irene sobbed, horrified to see her friend disemboweled and sprawling throughout the chamber. Her cries were only overwhelmed by Bishop’s maniacal laughter as his body fought the urge to black out. Dixie neither cried nor laughed, but only stared. 

The alien, still holding Sylas’ abdomen, shot another tendril out to gather up his arm. The black liquid flowed around the spacesuit. It fished the severed arm out of the suit, playing with it, bending it at the elbow and the fingers. It held the sliced shoulder up to the place it should have been had it not been removed.

——

“Oh! I get it now!” Warren shouted. “The cocoon thing. It’s not like their bodies at all. They just get inside of them.”

“Very mysterious, indeed,” Norman said. He was observing the two earthlings Bertha had brought inside the vessel. He conjectured that the starlight had killed them, deforming them in the process.

“They can expand like we do, it seems,” Warren continued. “They’re a different shade when they do this, though, and they produce a really loud sound when they start, but they quiet right down. Their expansion seems to be vectored around points of mass, unlike us.”

“How do you mean?” Norman turned his attention to Warren’s perspective. The earthling body was limp and in multiple pieces. It was extremely white. There were parts scattered all over that hadn’t been visible before. Liquid in negligible gravity was blossoming throughout the room. “Check for cellular respiration, Warren.”

“Negative, sir. I guess I killed it. Never mind, they can’t expand like we do.”

Norman laughed. “No, it seems they cannot. So, they’re still compositions of organ systems…”

His vessel shuddered. Orange light flooded the vessel. Chunks of material ripped away, opening up more of the decks to space. Norman turned his attention back toward Earth. Projectiles streamed from a piece of trash—well, it seemed a piece of trash before—in orbit. They shone with bright light before colliding into his vessel.

“Is this an attack?” Bertha asked.

“Well, whatever those things are, they’re deteriorating my ship. And organ-based creatures typically associate deterioration with undesirability. Inflicting it upon us, then, must be a kind of attack.” Norman chuckled. “Warren, they didn’t much like whatever it was you just did.”

——

“Evacuate, evacuate now!” The command from the voice at the intercom was intense with emotion. “Await flyby for net protocol. Evacuate now!”

Irene, Dixie, and Bishop turned away from the alien and sprinted for the emergency release lever on the end of the chamber. Irene was the first one there. She knelt and began punching commands into the terminal. The procedure for ejecting an entire chamber of the station was lengthy in order to avoid accidental jettison. Bishop pounded on her shoulder.

“Hurry, hurry!” He screamed. Dixie punched his arm, jeering at him through her blood-dusted visor. 

“Cut it out! You’ll fuck it all up!” She snapped. “You’re doing fine, Irene, keep it up girl…”

The end of the chamber bursted away from the station. A door slammed shut on the other end, slicing the alien in half. Every loose item, including Sylas and his parts, flooded into space. Irene, Dixie, and Bishop clutched each other as they careened through the void, legs flapping. Their suits became coated in Sylas’ blood, turning them each pink and red. As they settled into their ejection path amidst a cloud of gore, Dixie took deep breaths and tried to slow her sprinting heart.

——

“Ouch! Oooh! That stings…that really stings!” Warren complained as he was blasted away from the station.

“They’re trying to escape!” Norman said. “Warren, see if you can get those three back. I want to test some more things out on them.”

“Yeah, I’m on it!” Warren seethed one last time before the sting of live bisection seeped away.

“Dean, try not to let any more leave. Lock their can thing up. We’re gonna get out of here,” Norman said. He was referring to the severed half of Warren that was still inside the ship. 

“You got it,” Dean replied. He attached himself to the wall of the station and grew, spreading himself thinner and thinner over the gray walls. He sensed earthlings scrambling all around him, fumbling with panels. “Oh, I see…” he thought aloud.

“Good catch, Dean!” Norman praised, “stop them from messing with those panel things. That must be how they eject themselves from the can.”

Dean shrunk his body into thin wires as opposed to a two-dimensional net, conserving mass. This allowed him to inspect the entire station for the escape panels. When he found one, he attached himself to it, injected himself between the plates that held them together, and expanded. The shocks tickled him. He started to enjoy the sensation after the second time.

“I got all the panels,” Dean said. He snapped his body back into a more condensed form.

“Perfect. Stay put. I’ll start reeling you in while Warren grabs the escapees.”

——

Earth hung in the distance among the infinite black. Dixie could see a glimpse of it through her bloodied mask. Irene and Bishop, still in her grasp, comforted her even as her body quaked within the spacesuit.

“There…” Irene whispered. Dixie moved her eyes, catching sight of an approaching spaceship in the distance. 

“They’re going to get us. We’re saved…. Thank God, we’re saved,” Dixie stammered through tears.

“Dixie!” Bishop shouted over the comm.

Dixie turned her head toward her feet, which faced the space station. She kicked violently, groans tearing through the comm. The flowing alien was roping through the vacuum towards her. It ignored her kicks, planting itself on the sole of her boot. In an instant, it had wrapped as a thin film around Dixie’s spacesuit. It compressed, squeezing her.

Dixie shrieked with pain. Her helmet flew off, silencing her. The heat of the sun’s rays bore into her skin, peeling it from her skull. Irene and Bishop watched her deteriorate through their blood-soaked visors. The alien let go of Dixie’s body and wrapped around theirs, instead.

It started dragging them toward the alien vessel.

——

“No cellular respiration. I grabbed that one too hard,” Warren reported.

“No worries, we’ve got plenty of earthlings here. Actually, can you try something for me while you’re out there?”

“Of course.”

“Alright. I need you to block out that starlight first.”

——

The alien stopped dragging for a moment. With tendrils still grabbing the astronauts, it blew itself into a wide canvass, cutting Irene and Bishop out of the sunlight’s reach. 

“Oh, my God…” Irene sobbed. Tears floated in her spacesuit for a moment before steaming and circulating through her suit’s life support systems. Bishop only laughed. His eyes burned as his body forgot how to blink; they shook violently in his skull, seeing nothing.

Another tendril emerged from the blanket of alien flesh. It writhed down toward Bishop’s helmet, wrapping its base.

“Bishop!” Irene said. “Bishop, don’t let it take you from me! I can’t!”

The comm link buzzed. Irene heard Bishop laughing, desperately sucking in air to stoke his delirium. She cried harder, wailing through the comm. “Stop laughing! Stop! Stop laughing!”

The tendrils pulled apart.

Bishop’s face became clear in Irene’s vision. He was smiling with a wide, toothy smile, his eyes whited out. His flesh froze in an instant, mummifying him before her eyes.

“Oh…” she turned away, letting go of the hideous corpse, resigning herself to the clutch of the murderous clump which held her.

——

“Negative, no cellular respiration.”

“Alright, then it’s not the sunlight that kills them. Dean,” Norman said to the observer still within the earthling ship. “Start to analyze the atmosphere in there for me, alright? The earthlings must rely on their environment to survive.”

He turned back to the dead bodies on the perch before him. “Oh! But of course! They’re organ system dependent creatures! Of course environmental factors still affect their survival. Bertha, why don’t you call me on my crap one of these times, huh?”

“They still use organ systems?” Bertha scoffed. “Are they even alive?”

“That’s not really my purview,” Norman dismissed the mocking inquiry. “Alright, well, anyway. Warren, pack it up. Let’s roll! Be super careful with that last one.”

——

Scanning the darkness, Pilot Russ’ thumb shook as he pressed the button. “There’s nothing here, command,” he reported, “no space station, no alien vessel. They must’ve taken it.”

The voices on the other end cursed.

“There!” The copilot said, pointing. Russ veered the ship in that direction. A hatch opened in the side of the ship, spreading a net beside it. Russ slowed the ship, capturing the debris. He swept through the sector a few more times, inspecting it thoroughly with his copilot. 

In the belly of the spaceship, the crewmen sorted the debris. They milled about the mess, bagging everything. Among the evidence were three bodies; two without a helmet and one in complete disarray, organs scattered all along the ship floor. One of the crewmen gagged and stepped away. Another knelt by the corpses, wiping blood away from the nameplates. He pressed a button on the side of his helmet.

“Dixie Bennet…Bishop Hill. Both KIA. There’s another body here, sir, but we’ll need DNA analysis to ID.” He sighed, standing. “Alright, men. Take good care of them.”

He left the terminal to weep.