Cameron and Rose reached the front of the ship, breathing heavily in their spacesuits.
“Alright. How are we going to mess this up?” Rose asked.
“Freeze!” one of the creatures shouted from the other doorway.
“How about you do instead,” Rose said, shooting the creature in its middle eye. It screeched and flopped onto the floor, purplish-red blood spilling on the floor.
“That is a very weird color,” Cameron commented, looking at the body.
“Come on, let’s focus.”
“Right,” Cameron said, turning to all the buttons, “sorry.”
They both looked over the buttons and slowly came to a realization. “Tasks!” Rose exclaimed.
And with that in mind, they could mess up every single thing there. The only difference between these and the tasks back on the Skeld and HQ was that they were trying to do just the opposite of what the task intended. Enter ID Code? More like Break ID Card. Stabilize Steering? It became Unstabilize and Break Steering. And Chart Course? More like... well, still Chart Course, just the wrong course.
After they had thoroughly messed up every lever, button, and screen there, Rose said, “Okay, let’s get out of here! We need to make sure the others are alright and get in the Spy!”
They ran back through the ship, and it seemingly took forever. Were they going to get off the ship before the things caught them?
Skylar hid behind a pile of boxes in the storage room, barely breathing, worried that she would make a sound alerting them of her presence. They may only have eighty-eight left and counting, but those were comparatively high numbers, and Skylar didn’t want the ratio to get any more unbalanced. She peeked through a hole in the boxes... and saw another mask lurking in the pile right next to her.
Who is that?
She then saw a flash of orange as the other mask disappeared. A gun just like Query’s replaced it. Skylar ducked down and held up her own gun. If Query peeked again and saw it, they would both know for sure that neither was an Impostor. She looked up again after a minute. Query was staring at her.
She tried to motion to him, pointing to herself, then her gun, then Query, then her gun, and holding up all four fingers. Query nodded, probably meaning he already got it. Skylar had been expecting to have to make more signals, but it was Query. She shouldn’t have been.
She slowly counted down on her hand, and then they both jumped out of the boxes simultaneously, shooting at the things. Two were down immediately, and then Query shot another, but the last two had the weird forcefield around them that the Impostors seemed to have sometimes. It was annoying.
Query took out a Knife from some sort of pocket on his suit, and lunged at the things, managing to cut some of their tentacles. He stabbed at different parts of the forcefield of one, and finally his knife went through. It hit something electronic on the thing’s body, and the forcefield disappeared altogether.
Skylar followed his lead, trying to find a weak spot. Weird needle-like appendages kept coming at her, scratching up her spacesuit, but she always managed to avoid a full-on impact. She finally found a weak spot and made quick work of the creature after that.
“These things were surprisingly easy to kill,” Query said, “Maybe they’re a different type of... whatever these things are?”
Suddenly two figures burst in at the top of the room. Rose and Cameron. They looked at each other for a second, obviously talking, though they were too far away to hear, and then started making their way down and towards Query and Skylar.
It seemed like it took them hours, but when they finally got there, Rose yelled, “Let’s get back to the ship! Come on! No time to chat, glad you’re alive and all!”
They climbed and ran for a few minutes, and finally they were at the dock. They ran towards the ship. Skylar looked back, and almost tripped, horrified at what she saw. It was the things, but now they were blood-red instead of pink, and much bigger.
They got into the ship, and Query got to the controls of the platform. But there was a problem. Cameron was still lagging behind, and it looked like his arm had been stabbed by one of the new things. “GO WITHOUT ME! WE’LL ALL DIE IF YOU DON’T!”
“NO!” Skylar shouted, “WE WON’T LET YOU DO THAT!”
“I’m sorry Skylar,” Query said, “but... he’s right.”
The platform started to lift up. Cameron stopped running towards it, and stood still. It was as if time was moving through molasses. No.
And then a blood-red needle stabbed Cameron in the heart.
“LET’S GO!” Query shouted, “WE NEED TO GET OUT OF HERE!”
Rose started up the engines. Skylar, on the other hand, was paralyzed. It was like none of them realized quite yet that SOMEONE HAD JUST DIED. ONE OF THE LAST ONES LEFT.
A missile was shot at the door of the dock. The boom sounded faint. Skylar barely got herself into a seat before they blasted away from the ship.
“Wait, did you see that!? I think that was the Skeld 2! It looks like the cloaking device is working! Let’s shoot a tether out!” Query said somewhere in the far distance
As boarding the Skeld 2 was all figured out, Skylar wasn’t paying attention to any of it. They had done it... but there were only ten of them left. Had it really been worth it?
Query stared back at their planet from the long way away that the Skeld 2 was now at. He sighed sadly. So many bodies that they were leaving behind. So much misfortune. So much death. Why did it have to be this way? Why did their planet go wrong?
And in that moment, he knew. Something else was about to go wrong.
Goodbye, Creath, he said silently, looking out at the far away planet where their kind had lived for fourteen thousand years.
He watched the fire and debris spread out from their former home.