Chapter Text
Crimson red washed through the hull of the ship. The monster, god, or whatever entity from some Lovecraftian myth it was, loomed ominously. Simon’s skin burned and itched as though it were being pulled from his body. His left arm ached from the gaping wound on his bicep, where only skin and bone were left in the wake of the limb.
He breathes as the blood weight downs his body, and the remaining of the ship shook as the jagged teeth of the monster punctured the iron lung.
“This is bigger than me,” he reminded himself.” This is bigger than me,” he pleaded, to himself.
This was for humanity, this was for the future that he had long given up on.
And it wasn’t as if he could escape the jaws of this monster at the bottom of a blood ocean.
He made peace with it.
He told himself. He had accepted his fate.
There was no way out.
His grip tightened around the small sample of the Eden tree.
At least it will all be over soon.
At least he can finally rest when everything is done.
The moment had arrived as he anticipated the submarine's eruption, hoping it would be enough to take the monster with him.
“Join us simon!” the collective voice screamed.
“Not over my dead body!” Simon screams, but even he isn’t sure if his voice is gonna reach across the chaos. He wanted to breathe, but blood was flooding his lungs, slowly and painfully, the solid ground under him shook, and for one terrible moment, he felt an agonizing pain shot through him, worse than the skin being peeled off, worse than the arm being ripped off.
His face was opening up; he didn’t know why; he didn’t understand what was going on anymore; his head ached; his heart was pumping so hard it felt like it might jump out of his chest at any moment, and gain sentience as a new kind of species. The pressure was unbearable, too much, too much,
Based on the calculations in the documents and manual, Simon was faced with an estimated pressure of around 6,000 pounds per square inch. According to history, this pressure was approximately 400 times greater than that experienced at sea level on Earth. Simon could almost feel his bones threatening to break under the strain. If the submarine were to sink completely, he would quickly turn into a pile of bones and meat.
In the pure red that blinded him, he frantically reached for his face. His fingers touched the skin where his cheek and jaw should be, only to feel jagged, sharp teeth breaking through. His heart stopped. A moment stretched into infinity. For a moment, he wondered if all his strifes were for nothing; no, that can’t be true. This was the way to end it, to kill the monster. This was the right thing to do.
But what if it didn't actually die?
Why did it have to leave a sea of human blood?
Why was there a skeleton at the bottom of this cursed moon?
A monster's skeleton that managed to move and even grow flesh over itself?
What if this creature actually needed flesh to maintain its rigid, immortal existence?
One host after another.
What happened to SM-8? What happened to the crew?
Why did they slowly descend into madness to the point of believing that God was at the bottom of this astral body?
What if the monster only used its host body to remain immortal, turning them into the entity, granting it a new body to inhabit and a new consciousness to gain? And more blood would spill into this endless horror.
Maybe this place was the answer to the quiet rapture, or perhaps it was the reason for it. There were only four blood moons in the entire universe, and AT-5 was the one on which he had to die.
If this entity were merely trading one body for the next, what was the point of his struggles? Was he turning into a monster as well?
Simon the Butcher, the devourer of humanity's last hope; it almost sounded ironic.
There was no point in thinking about it anymore. He had retrieved the black box and let it go, hoping that someone might find it, anyone foolish enough to come back for research in this place.
All he had to do was wait for the submarine to go "kaboom," and his pain would be over. Or at least that’s what he told himself.
The truth about Simon was that he could never give up on his urge to survive.
In the last moment before the explosion took his consciousness, despite the pressure in his head and the anguish in every fiber of his body, he opened his eyes. In the distant darkness of the endless void, he saw a glimpse—not of the monster or the remains of the submarine, but a light.
It was small and weak, almost completely dimmed by the blackness. It could have been a hallucination, a trick of the mind, or the eyes. Simon wasn’t sure.
Subconsciously, he reached toward it, and for one last second, he breathed in the liquid. “I want to live,” the thought echoed loudly in his mind, almost as if he had screamed it.
If anyone could hear Simon, they would know he wanted to live.
Then the explosion engulfed him as the monster's jaws crumbled around him, and the submarine transformed into a grotesque form resembling a tree.
“Grace, bump my fist,” Rocky’s machine voice translated. The rock-like entity brought up one of its six legs and placed it on the shield surrounding him. The area that was presumably its face twitched slightly, while its other legs moved around excitedly.
Grace was bent over a table, working on a sample of Astrophage with bromine and testing all possibilities.
“I’m not done yet, buddy. You only fist bump when you achieve something,” Ryland explained, still focused on the sample and not paying any mind to Rocky’s endless movements.
Rocky shifted in his little ball, saying, “Right, right, right,” before rolling toward the window, which overlooked the endless expanse of space. He pointed his echolocation gun toward the glass and watched the movements and lights, content to give the scientist some time to work through his discovery.
Grace continued working for another fifteen minutes before alarms blared throughout the spaceship.
“Object A detected!” the ship's voice screamed.
“What object, Mary?” Ryland asked, rubbing his face in exhaustion. He straightened up and looked around.
“Object unidentified,” Mary responded. Grace sighed heavily, pushed his blonde hair out of his face, and moved toward the window beside Rocky. “Is there anything out there, Rocky?” he asked while scanning the screens to locate this unknown object.
Rocky shifted in his ball, pointing his stick around. “A rectangular shape is approaching from three o'clock. Worried, worried,” Rocky responded, turning again in his ball as his long legs propelled him like a hamster.
Grace pointed the camera in the direction and zoomed in until he saw… something he could only describe as a submarine. His eyebrows shot up as he focused, trying to discern what exactly he was observing.
A submarine in the middle of space was absurd, especially after encountering a rock entity with a spaceship that appeared to be entirely structured around echolocation, which sounded even more insane. The object didn’t seem to be navigating through space; rather, it was drifting as if someone had just discarded it like trash.
Grace acted before fully thinking through the implications, his hands already moving. “Mary, how much longer until the object is close to the ship and ready to impact?” Grace asked.
Rocky moved his ball beside Grace, reading the screens on his device. “The impact could damage your ship,” Rocky noted.
“Around 500 kilometers out, and it will impact in roughly 2 hours,” Mary replied.
Grace glanced at Rocky. “What do you think it is? It looks like a poorly built submersible ship of some sort,” He asked as he focused on the screen. Rocky tilted his head in confusion.
“Submersible ship? Question,” he said, tapping his feet.
“Oh, right, Erid doesn’t have water,” Ryland said, shifting towards the laptop on the desk and picking it up to type in the new terms.
“Remember the beaches and seas I showed you? Well, those waters are very deep, to the point where the bottoms of some of those oceans are still undiscovered. We humans, use machines to go under the surface of the water and navigate it,” he explained, quickly drawing small ships, boats, and submarines with the wires.
“Interesting, interesting, interesting,” Rocky said, tilting his head again.
Grace let out a laugh and stood up, his eyes fixed on the screen. “Yeah, it’s fascinating. Some people say the bottom of our seas can be even more mysterious than space,” Grace remarked, placing a hand on his waist and looking down at Rocky. His glasses slid down the bridge of his nose, and he looked over them with a smirk. “Though I’ve always been more interested in space.”
He tapped his free hand on the screen, causing the static echolocation from Rocky’s device to move in sync with his touch. “So what is a submarine doing in the middle of space?” Grace asked, both fascinated and slightly unsettled by this revelation.
“It flew?” Rocky suggested.
“No, no, they can't fly. Structurally, a craft built to withstand deep ocean pressure would likely handle a vacuum well. It won't be destroyed just yet, but it will slowly flood with radiation, lack sustainable oxygen, and if the occupant is lucky, they won’t freeze to death,” Grace explained.
He zoomed in and scanned the machine as best as he could. “It doesn’t seem to have a fuel tank or a navigation system,” Grace paused, contemplating. “How could such a thing be possible? Did the submarine just will itself into existence out of nowhere?” His mind raced ahead of him.
“Rocky, do you know of any other species in our solar system that might travel with a machine like that?” Grace asked, trying to understand the situation from a different angle.
“No, no, no,” Rocky answered.
Grace sighed heavily. How much weirder could this expedition get? First, the Petrov line appeared and began to consume the stars. Then he had to travel through space on a single-mission ticket. Now he had met the nicest alien, if you didn't account for the sarcasm, that felt hurtful, better than he could have ever imagined. Grace might have watched too many alien movies where astronauts get possessed or eaten by grotesque monsters, and now this.
He rubbed the back of his neck, shifting his weight from one leg to another.
“Is Grace okay?” Rocky asked, watching his friend.
Grace shook his head and looked down with a smile. “Oh, me? Yeah, yeah.” He cleared his throat. “So, should we move out of its way, or should we bridge to it and attempt contact with another species that I’m praying are friendly?” It didn’t even sound like a question.
“Is Grace curious about the subversive?” Rocky asked, ignoring Grace's question.
“Hmm?” Grace replied absentmindedly, still focused on the screen. “Oh, I don’t know, it could be dangerous,” he responded, leaning back against the wall. The fabric of his white shirt shifted up slightly, showing some skin on his torso. He folded his arms over his chest and fell deep into thought.
“What if it is another friend to help us? Another dying planet?” Rocky shifted closer to Grace and nudged his foot. Grace almost laughed to himself.
For a moment, he thought of Rocky as a very intelligent pet, which was absurd since Rocky was much older than him. But sometimes, Rocky unknowingly acted like a talking dog. Though he’d rather have his tongue ripped out than admit this.
“Yeah, you’re right. This might help us.” Grace moved forward and examined the image of the submarine.
It didn’t seem to have an airlock, which meant that if they opened the hatch, the submarine was going to implode.
His brows furrowed, creasing the skin between them. “That’s odd. What kind of ship is this?” he thought, typing the coordinates into the computer.
“Rocky, that ship doesn’t have an airlock. Could you connect the hatch to the tunnel you made to my ship?” Grace looked down, immediately calculating the speed and distance they needed to connect the entrances.
Rocky gave a thumbs down. “Yes, yes, yes.”
“Good. Let’s get moving.”
For the next 45 minutes, the human and Eridian prepared to board the submarine. First, they prepared two suits for Grace and the potential passenger on the submarine. The ship had drifted closer, and given its small size, it could accommodate no more than 2-3 people inside. They suspected the ship was likely evacuated, but just in case, they created one extra special suit to withstand the heat and pressure inside Rocky’s ship.
Both of them went to Rocky’s ship and waited for 15 minutes until the submarine was close enough to drift forward. Rocky moved around the ship, his feet creating a melody through the echolocation technology that amazed Grace. The tunnel attached to the hatch led to solid ground made of Xenonite, paving the way for them.
Rocky and Dr. Grace approached the hatch. The ship was, for lack of a better word, wrecked. Dents covered the iron structure, and rust and soot had turned the ship a crimson color. Grace moved beyond the threshold of glass and peeled away his hazmat suit, setting the extra one beside his own. Rocky watched from his position curiously, shifting.
Grace moved toward the hatch and grabbed the iron handle with his hands. A slimy texture touched his skin, prompting him to look at his hands, which were covered in soot, rust, and a red liquid.
“If this turns into an alien movie, I’ll cry,” Grace mumbled, a sense of dread overwhelming him. Nonetheless, he turned the hatch with great difficulty until it finally opened.
When the hatch opened, a puddle of red liquid poured out, just enough to cover Grace’s and Rocky’s legs. Grace frowned and almost leaned down to touch it but immediately felt the shift of weight and nearly stumbled.
“What? What? What? Question,” Rocky asked, quickly stepping back. “What is the red liquid, Grace? Question.”
“Stay here, Rocky,” Grace said before entering the submarine. Strange vines and wires covered the walls, or what remained of them. With each step he took, the puddle splashed beneath his feet.
“This is straight out of a horror movie,” Grace nervously said, well aware that Rocky could still hear him.
Out of curiosity, Ryland leaned down and touched the puddle with the pad of his fingers. He stood back up and smeared the liquid across his index finger and thumb. Brnging his hand forward to his face, he smelled it.
Iron.
The smell was unmistakable. Carefully, he brought it to his lips and tasted it.
“Blood.”
His heart stopped for a second.
Why was there so much blood inside this ship?
How was it even possible?
“What is blood?” Rocky’s voice grew louder to reach him.
“It’s what keeps everything alive on Earth. I’m not sure about other aliens, but it’s the system that transports substances and molecules around the body to keep any living thing functioning,” Ryland explained. He knew that on Erid, no water was needed for survival, and therefore, no blood existed.
He gulped. “Rocky, if I die here, just remember to send the samples back to Earth for me,” Grace said. From afar, he heard a noise in response, but without super hearing, he ignored whatever Rocky might have said.
He moved inside the submarine, fully standing. The submarine was tilted to one side; a chair had been thrown across the space, and pipes and wires covered every inch. Once Grace stood inside the interior, he stepped on what seemed to be an unknown panel, with a computer attached up ahead. He worried about it falling on his head before remembering that there was no gravity in this place to actually harm him. The contents of the interior floated around, but for some unsettling reason, it seemed only the blood had remained on the ground.
Before Grace could spiral into the reason behind this phenomenon, he spotted a body floating nearby. He stepped forward.
“Hello?” he asked nervously, looking at the alien.
No, that was a human, a man in his late thirties, about his own age. He had long black hair that almost reached his shoulders and an ungroomed beard. His clothes were torn and patched together, and his left arm was missing. The man had his back turned to Grace, so he could only see fragments of him. Before he could think much about it, he moved forward and caught the man's shoulders. He felt weightless, showing no response to Grace's intrusion.
Ryland slowly turned the man’s body, fully expecting an alien to jump out of his mouth and lay eggs inside his chest. But to his fortune, the man seemed to be unconscious. His lashes rested on his full cheeks, and bruises were beginning to form on his face, along with two deep scars on the left side of his temple.
“Hey, can you hear me?” he asked, worriedly. The man didn’t seem to be dead; his chest rose and fell steadily under Grace’s fingers. Ryland dragged the man toward the entrance, and the moment they touched the xenonite ground, gravity shifted back. Ryland’s feet hit the ground, now weighed down by the man, causing both of them to fall.
“Uhhhh, shit,” he grumbled, his hands trapped beneath him.
“What’s going on, Grace? Question,” Rocky’s voice carried through the tunnel.
The man was slightly shorter than Ryland, at least it seemed that way to him. He weighed about the same, but for some reason, his body felt like a mass of muscle built on bones. When Ryland tried to carry the man completely, he almost fell down. Blood soaked the man’s clothes and seeped onto Grace’s hands. He almost recoiled, but nonetheless kept trying to pick the man up.
Finally, He managed to wrap one of the man’s arms around his own shoulder, and Ryland firmly grabbed his waist, dragging him until they reached the wall.
“Is it another human? Question,” Rocky asked, his legs tapping rhythmically.
“Yes, it seems like it,” Grace replied, putting the man down beside the glass. Rocky examined the man as he usually did.
“Is he injured? Question.”
Grace’s hands began to work, carefully wrapping the special suit made of glass around the man, making sure not to touch the recently healed scar tissue on his left arm.
The injury appeared to have occurred at the shoulder joint, the most fragile joint in the arm, and the force required to cause such damage must have been agonizing.
When he finished, Ryland put on his own armor and carried the other man to Rocky’s ship so they could return to Mary and figure out what was going on. From what he had gathered inside the submarine, the technology was almost ancient but different from Earth’s. The problem was that the ship seemed to be an ordinary submarine, not designed for traversing space. There was no gravity inside, no navigation system, only two panels that displayed the depth and the O2 tank level.
Nevertheless, this man mattered more than Ryland's curiosity about the origin of the ship, and he could always get answers from him later. Once they settled back in Mary, Rocky rolled around with all sorts of comments and questions, while Grace worked on removing the man’s clothes and settling him on the examination table, with Armando checking over him.
“Vital signs stable, breathing stable, slight blood loss, lack of blood sugar, dehydration, and a slight trace of strong alcohol in the blood,” Armando summarized before he carefully managed to put an oxygen mask over the man's mouth.
Ryland watched the rise and fall of the man's chest for another five minutes before leaving the medical room and heading to the research lab.
“Is this human your friend?” Rocky asked, sounding inquisitive.
Grace picked up the astrophage and put a small dosage onto a sample glass before leaning forward to examine it with a microscope, adjusting the height and zoom.
“Not every human is a friend, buddy. I don’t know who he is,” Grace replied.
“What was the red liquid?” Rocky asked, directing his echolocation gun toward the sample to study it alongside Grace.
As if remembering in that moment, Grace took a small vial of blood that he had hastily collected and dropped a few droplets onto another sample glass, focusing on it until the moving cells inside became clear. From the looks of it, the cells seemed to belong to a human, and their movements appeared normal. However, a few small black dots occasionally darted around, devouring some of the blood cells, growing until they burst into smaller black dots and kept going. They almost resembled parasites or perhaps cancer cells, but in all his career, Grace had never seen cancer cells move this fast.
He bit his lower lip absentmindedly and studied the astrophage again. The movement of the astrophage and those cells seemed almost identical.
Very carefully, Grace extracted a few of those cancerous life cells and started the same experiment he had once conducted on Earth. He injected hydration, oxygen, carbon dioxide, and any element he had on hand that could trigger a reaction. It almost reacted to nothing, other than water, which it began devouring completely. Grace hadn't realized that it had already been hours since he had started; other than Rocky’s occasional shuffling and questions, no other sound interrupted his work.
At last, after testing almost every element on the periodic table, he took a few live cells and injected them alongside the black ones. They immediately reacted. The black cells had once devoured the hydroxon oxidase, just making the water evaporate, but they absorbed the live cells, taking them apart and incorporating them into themselves.
It was almost unsettling to watch. He leaned back in his chair, rubbing his eyes beneath his glasses and taking a heavy breath.
He walked toward the supply cabinet and picked up a bottle of 80% alcohol, using it to clean his supplies. The needle of the syringe dipped into the burning liquid before Ryland dropped one drop beside the cells. To his accidental surprise, the cell recoiled, trying to capture the droplet, and part of it burned immediately.
"That wasn’t cancer or a parasite!" he thought. What type of cell reacted so strongly to alcohol?
“Rocky, make sure not to touch the blood too much, and if you do, clean it with this alcohol right away,” Ryland instructed.
He stood up and walked toward the medics. Armando moved his hands around in a welcoming gesture.
“Hello, Armando. How is our patient doing?” Ryland asked as he looked over the man. Armando had mostly cleaned him up and put one of Ryland’s shirts on him instead of his own tattered clothes. The text on the shirt read, “I had potential.”
“That’s my favorite shirt! Why did you put that on him?” Ryland asked, displeased.
“It was the only cloth available,” Armando replied, moving his hands like an ashamed child trying to cover his face.
Ryland huffed. “Well, it doesn’t matter.” He sat down in the chair beside the bed and shook some alcohol onto a clean bandage before carefully cleaning the patient’s skin, making sure no blood remained on him.
Then, he carefully wrapped the alcohol-soaked bandages around the more severe wounds, earning a wince from the unconscious man.
“Sorry, but it’s good to be careful,” Grace whispered.
As he finished, he finally relaxed. Despite the terrors the man had clearly gone through, he seemed tranquil in his dreamless sleep. He was the first man Ryland had seen in the past year, and it almost felt strange to feel the warmth of another human’s skin under his hands.
He didn’t let the moment linger too much, retracting his hand back to himself.
“Armando, you said there was alcohol in his blood? What was the percentage?” Grace asked, looking down at the tablet where he had entered his research about the black cells.
“The percentage isn’t clear due to the passage of time. The estimation is between 50% to 80% pure alcohol,” the robot replied.
Grace's face scrunched up in disgust at the thought of drinking pure alcohol. His stomach must have suffered for days because of that. But, consequently, the alcohol seemed to be the only reason he had managed to stay intact in that puddle of blood. Based on Ryland's experiment, if in contact with those dangerous cells for more than four hours, they would be destroyed, and nothing of him would have remained. This could also partially explain the scars resembling acid burns on his skin, along with the redness around his eyes and the bridge of his nose; blood must have spilled over him, and he hadn't bothered to clean it.
"Armando, can you give me a sample of his blood?" Grace asked, standing up and lazily stretching the tired muscles in his arms. The aching pain in his back and shoulders eased for a few seconds.
Armando pinched a needle into the man's arm and, after a few seconds, handed a vial over to Ryland.
"Thanks, dude." Grace walked back into the lab, sat down in his chair, and pushed the microscope toward himself. He examined the blood for any signs of black cells. To his relief, other than a slight infection that could be fixed in a few days, nothing seemed wrong. He sighed and leaned back, his mind racing a million miles per second.
"Grace is worried about the human," Rocky stated matter-of-factly.
Grace looked at the ball as if it owned the place. "Well, yeah, it’d be a shame if he died. I have so many questions," Grace replied.
"Grace can rest now; Rocky watches the human sleep," Rocky said before turning toward the medical ward.
Ryland chuckled and pushed himself up to clean his work desk. Since Rocky had officially moved in with him, he couldn’t just leave his stuff around the ship without Rocky nagging him to clean while he knocked over everything.
Rest would be good. He cleaned his face with the sponge baths meant for astronauts and walked toward his bed, lying down on the mattress and staring at the ceiling until sleep took him away, with only the stranger's face on his mind.
.
.
.
.
About five hours later, Ryland was awakened by loud shouting and the sound of things breaking.
"Grace, Grace, Grace! The human is awake!" Rocky's voice came through as Grace looked around in confusion. He quickly pulled the nearest shirt over his head and rushed to the medical room, only to find almost everything thrown against the wall, with the man huddled in the back, holding a fire extinguisher.
"What the hell is that?" The man shouted, frantically looking around the unknown place. Ryland raised both hands in a gesture of peace.
"Hey, it’s okay, calm down," Grace said. The man’s eyes fell on Grace, and he visibly calmed down a bit just at the sight of another human.
He pointed the extinguisher at Grace as if it were a weapon. His feet were wobbly, clearly shaking from exhaustion. His wavy hair covered most of his face, and there was a madness in his black eyes that Grace had never seen before.
"Who are you? Where am I?" he asked, his voice shaking as his eyes searched the room for something familiar.
“I’m Doctor Ryland Grace. This Eridian over here is my friend Rocky. He is an alien, but don’t worry, he’s friendly.” Grace pointed with his right arm toward Rocky, who was rolling around frantically. “You are on the Hail Mary spaceship. We found you drifting in space inside a submarine,” Grace explained.
The man’s arm slowly lowered, but confusion appeared on his face, causing the skin on his forehead and around his eyes and mouth to wrinkle.
“What? In space? I was on AT-5. Where are David and Jack? Eva died; I need to inform them!” he exclaimed, glancing around before noticing the clothes he was wearing. Grace anticipated his question and responded before he could ask.
“Your clothes were covered in blood, soot, and rust, and they were torn in too many places, Armando.” He pointed to the machine, and Armando waved his long mechanical hand. “He changed your clothes and fixed you up.”
The man’s face contorted into an expression of pain, not physical, but mental. “I need to get back. That was the deal: I get the black box, and then I’ll be free. I did my job; the COI has to let me go now,” he said before setting the extinguisher down. His eyes remained fixed on his left shoulder as his hand moved to touch the spot where his hand should have been.
Grace watched in curiosity, but for the first time in his life, he held his tongue and waited for the man to calm down.
“Are you with the COI?” the man asked, sitting down on the floor. His legs spasmed from strain.
Grace shook his head, his blonde hair falling over his forehead. “Um, no? I don’t know of any COI,” he replied.
The man looked at him, bewildered. “What? How can you not know of the COI?” he grumbled. “Then are you with Eden? Did my brothers finally send someone to rescue me?” A glimpse of hope shone in his dark eyes.
Grace slowly sat down on the cold metal floor, a shiver running down his spine. “No, I don’t know of them either,” he replied, folding his hands on his knees.
The man’s eyebrows drew together, and he regarded Grace suspiciously. Realizing that this conversation might not end well, Grace decided to change the subject.
“I’m Ryland Grace. What’s your name?” he offered with a cordial smile.
The man paused, examining Grace and Rocky. He visibly relaxed, closed his eyes for a moment, and took a deep breath.
“Simon,” his voice came out raspy and tired.
“Simon, what?” Grace asked.
“Just Simon.”