Commander Viktor’s hopes of surviving the soaring rage of the pyroclastic clouds sway from zero to a hundred and back to zero with each turn of a corridor as he and his men raced for their lives. Although his map promised a positive outlook, the upheaval unfolding made them seem like corpses scratching the interior of their coffin already buried five feet under. The whole spacecraft bawled around them, ransacked by the storm, shaking and bashing like a bus rolling downhill. “No, no! Take a left,” Viktor shouted Casper before he made a wrong turn. The three of them had the same map showing on their heads-up display, but panic deceived them. “Wait, watch out!” The three men recoiled as pellets shot right through the walls like butter, oxygen then flushing furiously through the holes in a sudden decompression.

“Holy shit,” Casper shouted.

As if it wasn’t enough already, the pierced wall blasted to pieces as a huge rock crashed through, panels, cables, and rubble whirling and ramming all around. Viktor and the others grasped to whatever they could before decompression swept them out of the vessel.

“Keep going,” Viktor yelled, his voice dissolved by the fuss. He wrapped his gloved fingers on the exposed structure of the corridor, one hand and then the other, until reaching the door ahead. A few feet behind, Casper and Lucas fought to follow, dangling from the structure as debris swept past them. Viktor extended a hand to Casper first. “Here, Lieutenant. Come on!”

Casper gripped the Commander’s hand tight, almost constricting, while giving him the sight of somebody struggling to convince himself all would be okay in the end. In spite of the absent gravity, the suction force of the atmosphere decompression returned Casper his weight, rendering his body into a ballast. With both feet planted against the doorframe, Viktor pulled his friend as hard as his adrenaline-fueled body granted. Before he yielded, Casper hauled himself the rest of the way with his free hand.

Lucas was next; the boy dangled from a crevice on the wall like a cat about to drop from a line. Viktor grabbed his arm and pulled hard—too hard, overestimating the boy’s weight. The Commander hit the ground butt-first as Lucas flung above him and crashed into the wall behind, consumed by a shower of insulating material and panels.

They only had but a few seconds to catch their breath. The party continued their escape through more corridors. Viktor noticed how the air turned into a thin mist. A few more feet and seeing ahead was impossible.

“What’s this?” Casper asked from ahead, coughing.

Viktor scanned the area; a busted pipe gushing gas right above Lucas was the culprit. However, his eyes almost pop out of their sockets as they spot the cables dancing to the huff of the gas, sparking. His whole body tensed, his limbs urging for movement. “Move, it’s gonna blow,” he yelled at Lucas who didn’t even blink. Firing up his stabilizers, he rocketed and crashed into the Doctor. They both rolled across the corridor and rammed into Casper. A rolling fist of flames jabbed the astronauts through the door and into the next passage as the gas combusted and blasted, turning the place into a blazing furnace. Everyone scattered on the next section, rolling, tumbling—complete chaos. Alarms went off inside Viktor’s helmet, increasing in volume as he recovered. He almost coughed his lungs out, his joints stinging as if replaced by sandstones.

“Commander?” Annie radioed. “What happened down there? The video feed went down.”

Viktor coughed again, feeling like a knee to his gut. “Agh… we’re still in one piece somehow, Captain. A pipe blew up.” He noticed his map gone from his heads-up display. “Shit, I lost telemetry.”

“I can guide you through. The airlock should be close.”

“Alright, where to?”

“One moment…”

As Annie traced the path, Casper approached Viktor with Lucas grabbed by the back of his suit like a rag doll. “That was a close call.”

Enjoying the story so far? Subscribe for news and updates on my stories and get a free copy of The Cow and The Moon and a preview of Goliath Fallen in ebook and PDF format. No B.S, no spam, just nice things! Email address: Leave this field empty if you're human:

Viktor didn’t respond to him stating the obvious; he was far worried about the boy who didn’t move aside from occasional leg spasms.

Casper noticed. “Don’t worry; he’ll live.” He patted on Lucas’s helmet.

“I’m okay.” Lucas coughed, giving the Commander a thumbs up.

“OK, got it,” Annie said. “Stay on that path for three hundred feet, then make a right twice. The airlock should be waiting there.”

“Any obstacles we should be aware of?” Viktor asked.

“Hard to tell, Commander. With all this hustle, there’s no way to graph the interior of the vessel accurately.”

With precious seconds slipping through, the party hurried down the path Annie had devised for them. Viktor blindly trusted her with his life, but the farther they went, the more it looked they were going in circles. They weren’t, however; they eventually reached the door to the last corridor leading to the airlock. The door was open last time, Viktor reckoned. Now, it was locked. Water? Viktor squinted to see better through the dusty window in the door. He didn’t imagine things—the corridor had submerged underwater, and the door had sealed to contain the flood. Viktor bashed a weak fist on the door in frustration; nobody had told the thing the rest of the ship was falling apart, and it didn’t matter if it became a goddamn aquarium. “Captain, we need another route.”

“On it,” Annie replied.

Viktor waited for her response, but it didn’t come. “That was our only way, wasn’t it?” he asked her, already expecting a negative.

Annie didn’t reply; only static.

“Captain?”

No reply.

“Captain, can you hear me?”

Annie responded this time, her voice bursting into the audio channel. “Commander, brace for impact, a large rock is about to—!”

The radio channel died, and the party’s surroundings sunk and shook with the fierce roar of churning metal. Then everything heaved forwards, and they rolled into a blob of limbs and crashed against the closed door. Casper fell on top of the bunch, crushing both Lucas and the Commander; the man’s weight was pure acceleration—unfortunate physics.

“Ca… captain.” Viktor sought to recover, his arms reaching for grasp. “Captain, what the hell was that?” He pushed the others away.

The bawling of the engines of the Zenith blasting at full power saturated the radio channel. “A large rock, Commander. It… it hit the vessel, shit… that was the biggest one yet.” She cursed so sparingly that it sounded uncanny. “The vessel is sinking into the clouds quickly. I’m trying to keep up, but I’ll have to pull out soon, or the ship will run out of fuel.”

Viktor couldn’t help but ask himself how worse things could get. Then he peeked at the locked door—he exhaled hard. “Shit.”

Casper approached the door. “Wait. Look. The water… it’s flushing.”

Viktor didn’t have enough focus to process whatever Casper meant by “flushing.” However, past the window, he noticed the bubbles sprouting from fissures on the walls of the flooded passage. The water level was dropping—slow but steady. Then quicker. Casper turned at him with eyes overflowing with hope; once the water drained, the door would open, and they’d be on their way. But Viktor knew what was going on. “Back. Turn back, hurry,” he shouted at the top of his lungs.

The fissures spiraled through the flooded passage and spawned into the one where the party was, like a skin disease rapidly spreading.

“What the hell?” Casper said, backing away, eyes wide in terror.

Lucas was already stumbling in the opposite direction when the corridor turned into a bent throat of metal, decomposing into cables, panels, pipes, dust, foam, water, fire, pressure—the place crumbled before the astronauts. Sudden and subjugating, depressurization returned to suck everything towards outer space as the whole vessel ripped apart in half, its structure subduing to the damage of the last impact. Both Casper and Lucas pulled back to a safe distance—or at least as safe as one could be when your ship suddenly snapped in two. As for Viktor, his fingers clamped on the ground, fighting an unseen force that pulled him by the legs as the air escaped the vessel. He gave in and then grabbed again—only a fraction of a second, but enough to leave the Commander hanging from the edge of the destroyed passage.

“Holy shit, Viktor!” Casper tried approaching, grasping to a bent rail in the wall, cautiously or else he would leave the vessel first. “Hang on, man, I’ll get you.” He reached for the Commander and pulled. Didn’t seem to be a challenge for him, but to get Viktor all the way back inside, he secured one arm around his armpit. “Gotcha.”

With his body drowned in adrenaline, Viktor didn’t feel other need than gulping air for his insatiable lungs. He peered at the other half of the craft straying farther and farther into the clouds, massive, like a leviathan sinking dead in the ocean. There it went their only escape route.

“You alright man?” Casper asked him.

He said nothing. His mind was cloudy, distant.

“Come on, man, say something. You still there?”

Defeat. Hadn’t Casper realized they had fallen in quicksand and was now too late? “I’m sorry,” Viktor muttered, his sight planted in what remained of the ground. “This was a terrible idea. I shouldn’t have brought you all into this mess. We… we won’t make it.”

The Lieutenant and the young Doctor kept silent. Behind the Commander, the pyroclastic clouds continued raging outside, slowly eating their half of the vessel.

Viktor didn’t dare to see them in the eye. He wondered how pathetic and weak he looked to them now. For a moment, the future of humanity didn’t matter anymore; the world had disappeared, and it was only them.

Casper wouldn’t have that though; he grabbed the Commander by the collar of his suit and glared at him, their helmets pressing against each other. The reddish hue of the scorching clouds behind them reflected in his pupils. “Don’t you dare to give me that shit, Viktor—not now that we’re so close.”

What? Didn’t he understand? They were trapped. Perhaps the heat had driven him mad, Viktor thought.

“Here, Farmer.” Casper pulled a harness from one side of his suit, unrolled it, and gave the other end to Lucas. “Lock this to your suit.” He didn’t offer the other one to Viktor—he just latched it to his suit and went off to the rough edge of the corridor.

“Where are you going, Lieutenant?” Viktor said with no energy left to argue with him.

“Well, Commander, we can’t go back, and we can’t go forward.” With one hand secured to a bent pipe, Casper glanced upwards. “So, we’re going up.”

Viktor realized he didn’t only look pathetic and weak, but dumb too. They didn’t need an escape route. They were outside already. Regardless, the ascent towards the top of the vessel wouldn’t be an easy feat.

Casper led the party, grabbing from a twisted seam and pulling himself up, and then assessing his next move. Although weightless, the smallest mistake would result in the strong currents of boiling air dragging them into the void. That didn’t pose as much as a threat than the army of crooked, bent and pointy seams protruding from the coarsely slit cliff of metal looming above the three men. The slightest brush would puncture their suit, and that would be the end of it.

Their luck didn’t abandon them, and the top was now just a few meters ahead, past a torn ventilation duct and a massive slab of metal hanging from the hull. As Casper reached to grasp it, Viktor thought of all the bad things that had happened one right after the other; he was sure the plate would come off. But it didn’t. Casper reached and pulled himself upwards, and the others with him. Panting his lungs out, Viktor shot his body upright before his suit fried against the searing hull of the vessel—that would take seconds now that the temperature peaked with the storm. He hauled the rest of the harness and helped Lucas up. Viktor still didn’t dare to say the boy a thing; he couldn’t think of anything that could ease the sheer terror off his face either.

“Hurry, fellas. We still have a good stretch to go,” Casper said.

About two hundred yards ahead, the Zenith sway and waved above the alien vessel, fighting the violent force of the storming clouds and debris trashing it. Getting there wouldn’t be a problem if only wasn’t for their magnetic boots. One foot up and then a clank on the ground. One step after the other, the group pushed forwards bracing from the turmoil. The smaller rocks previously lodged on the hull rolled dully out of their place yielding to the strong current. Luckily, they were too slow to pose a threat. However, a giant boulder crashed from above and jolted on the ground a few meters ahead. Viktor didn’t realize it until the blizzard of debris was already on them. He covered by reflex. If it weren’t by the magnetic boots, he and the others would’ve meandered off towards certain death.

Once the blaze stopped, the first thing Viktor thought of was checking his suit for cuts. No alarms were firing into his helmet, meaning that he had survived the impact. By a hair, but he had survived. “Is everybody okay?” he asked the others.

“Shit, that was close,” Casper shouted for about the third time, coming out of cover and coughing.

“Doctor? Are you okay?” Viktor asked Lucas.

No reply.

Viktor searched around for the boy. “Doctor?”

For Casper, that was a close call, but for Lucas, his life was on the line at that moment. He gasped for air, bulged eyes almost popping, grasping his neck to breathe as oxygen wheezed out of from all over his suit. “H… help. I can’t… I can’t breathe.”

“His suit punctured,” Viktor yelled at Casper. “Go get him. Don’t let him touch the ground or his suit will fry!”

The Lieutenant was already on his way; he radioed Annie as he trudged towards Lucas. “Ann, quick, shut off his boots so I can carry him back to the ship,” he said, huffing and puffing.

“You got it,” Annie replied.

“Alright, Farmer, stay with me,” Casper said while grabbing the boy and placed him on his shoulders. “No one’s dying today.” He continued towards the Zenith, surprisingly fast considering his feet glued to the ground with each step.

“Captain, we need you to get closer. We’re still too far,” Viktor said as he slogged to catch up.

“Negative, Commander, the debris is too dense. I won’t be able to pull back.”

“Request Kepler for rescue. We’ll burn the rest of the fuel to get out.”

“Commander, we don’t—”

Viktor glared at the Zenith as if right into Annie’s eyes as she struggled in the pilot seat. “Do it. Now!”

The thrusters boomed at maximum capacity as the ship banked closer. Way too close. Its bottom hit the vessel hard and kicked back—but it was in reach now. Viktor shot a hand at the doorframe of the airlock, grasped tight, and pulled himself inside. Finally, a moment of relief. They were one step closer to ending this nightmare. “Here, Lieutenant.” He then reached for Lucas on Casper’s shoulders. As his friend handed him the boy over, Viktor latched a harness to his suit and threw him inside to worry about him later. It was his friend’s turn when the Zenith bashed the vessel once more, missing him by a hair, and once again kicking back. Casper was now a good twenty yards away, his hand still extended, looking at the ship in desperation.

“Shit, hang on, Lieutenant,” Viktor shouted, hanging from the edge of the airlock. “Captain, get us closer!”

“I’m on it, Commander, but the current is too strong.”

“Hurry!”

Standing still on the hull of the alien vessel, Casper lowered his previously extended hand, sight fixed upwards past the ship with a blank expression on his face.

“Lieutenant, we’re almost there.” Viktor pondered what had caught the man’s attention so bad to distract him from hell unraveling around him.

Casper’s eyes shifted to the Commander. His expression relaxed as if in his mind, he had returned home, back to his family. In his charred suit, the man gifted the Commander a smile and saluted him with his left hand.

Viktor was still unsure of what had gotten into him. “Lieutenant?”

And in a split second, his lifelong friend was gone, consumed by another boulder jolting against the hull and exploding into a million pieces. The Zenith banked away from the impact as debris barraged at it.

Viktor didn’t cover.

His body didn’t respond.

His brain had used every last bit of energy in his body to digest what he had just witnessed and had locked. He slipped away from reality, the scene processing like a movie he was watching. The scene shrunk as he plunged farther and farther down a black void. As he went, the image of Eli, Casper’s wife, and his son flashed before his eyes. There was nothing else in his mind. Sensation returned to him for a second; a burning sensation in his body towed him off his daydreaming. He was back on the airlock of the Zenith, debris bustling around him. His hand had clung to his abdomen by itself, containing the stream of crimson liquid leaking from him, drifting away as strands in the air. By the looks of it, paralyzing pain should have been cutting through his nerves. But an embracing warmth was all he felt. This time over, alarms fired inside his helmet, data blinking in red in his heads-up display—all muffled noises to him.

He was dying.

It didn’t surprise or shocked him. He was okay with it. But before that, there was one last thing pending. As Viktor’s remaining air wheezed out from the bleeding cuts in his suit, he scanned the airlock for Lucas. The boy was a few steps away from the door, lingering about but still secured to the harness. The overflowing adrenaline suppressed the pain as Viktor approached him. He gripped Lucas by the collar of his suit and spoke with the last breaths of life left in him. “Take this, Doctor.” He pressed the alien device hard against the boy’s chest and helped both of his arms on it. “Make sure this gets home.” He coughed, the taste of iron staining his mouth.

Lucas didn’t move, but his arms tightened weakly.

That was enough acknowledgment for the Commander. “We’re… we’re counting on you… don’t let us down,” Viktor said, unsure how much of that left his mouth as his eyelids started closing.

Blur.

Coldness.

And at last, everything faded into nothing.