Steven McDonald - Event Horizon

Miller stopped and turned. “You prep the Gravity Couches. I’m going to manually arm those explosives.”

“Will this shit work?” Cooper said.

“It worked for Weir,” Miller said. He doubted anyone was in the mood for ironic comments. “Prep the tanks.”

Starck stepped toward him. “I’ll go with you—”

“Just get those tanks ready,” he said, moving toward the hatchway. He nodded at the hatch. “Close it behind me. Just in case.”

Starck stared at Miller for a long moment, as though trying to burn his face into her memory. “Miller…”

“Be right back,” he said, attempting a reassuring, confident tone and knowing that he was failing miserably.

He smiled, knowing it to be false, and stepped through the hatch. She stared at him for a moment longer, then reached to her right.

The hatch closed with a dull sound and he was alone.

He took a deep breath and ran.

He made it to the central corridor in record time, hurtling along it as though trying to break every sprinting record in the book. Reaching a coupling, he dropped quickly to one knee, reaching down to pop the catches on the cover of an explosive charge.

He lifted the cover off. There was an unlit indicator on the charge, and a single switch. One of the switch positions was labeled MANUAL in bold letters.

Leaving the cover off, he went to the next charge, repeating the process, hurrying as much as he dared. They were almost out of time….

Cooper and Starck went down the rows of Gravity Couches, checking each one, opening them, closing them again, checking the display panels. As long as everything worked in the life suspension systems, they were in fine shape. On this trip they did not need to worry about the state of the inertial dampers—they were unlikely to be picking up much in the way of thrust.

“I’m gonna activate the emergency beacon,” Cooper said.

“Hurry,” Starck said. All things considered, she did not want to spend any time alone, not now.

Cooper grabbed a flashlight from an open locker and pulled open a floor access panel. He peered down into the access tube, then sat down on the edge, lowering himself into it. She watched him vanish, then turned back to her work, going over to the main workstation.

It was a redundant check, but it still needed to be done. She activated three of the empty Gravity Couches, watching the readouts to confirm the proper rate of gel flow into the tanks. So far so good.

Behind her, two of the tanks began to fill with green gel.

In Medical and on the ruined bridge, the bio-scans were going wild again, off the scale, the electronics distorting the data to try and make it fit within the parameters their designers had set.

In the Second Containment, the Core darkened, rippling as energy built up within it. Dark lightning curled around it, reaching out to the control spikes.

Reality ran like water.

Behind Starck, something thudded against the side of one of the Gravity Couches, startling her out of her focus on the workstation. Before she could turn around, the sound came again.

She expected to see Cooper, back from belowdecks.

She stared for a long moment. Two of the Gravity Couches had filled with green gel, but the third was darker, more liquid. If she hadn’t known better, she would have thought that the liquid was blood, but it could not be.

Somewhere in the system, there had been a fluid containment failure, allowing the gel to degrade. She would have to drain the tank and activate another one.

There seemed to be something moving in the tank. Slowly, she walked over to it, trying to focus, trying to figure out what could have gotten into the fluid. She had never heard of this sort of gel breakdown before, but Gravity Couches were not her area of expertise by far.

She leaned toward the tank.

Another low thud.

A face pressed up against the glass of the tank, grinning at her.

Weir.

She screamed, backing away. Weir’s face had not finished forming yet, the skin incomplete, the white of bone showing through, muscle tissue flexing as he worked his jaw.

“Cooper!” she screamed.

The tank exploded in a torrent of glass shards and thick blood.

Weir, still grinning, still forming, came for her.

Cooper crouched in the access tunnel beneath the Gravity Couch Bay, working his way along the circuit panels, finally locating the breaker that controlled power to the emergency beacon. It had somehow been fused open.

Working quickly, he rigged a bypass, restoring power. The panel in front of him lit up like a bad night in Las Vegas. It would take hours yet, but USAC

would eventually pick up the distress beacon.

He closed the panel and backed up.

Something wet and sticky struck his shoulder, soaking into his flight suit.

He turned his head, shocked, looked up. Blood was running in a rivulet along the ceiling, dripping at intervals.

He started back toward the vertical access.

“Starck?” he called. Blood was splashing into the access tunnel, far too much of it to be from one single person. “Starck?”

He reached the ladder, moving cautiously to look upward.

Starck fell, almost catching herself on the ladder, losing her grip. She was covered in blood. She landed awkwardly on the deck, rolled over, tried to get to her feet. Cooper bent to help her.

“Run!” she screamed at him, shoving him away.

He looked up.

Weir oozed into the vertical access, staring down at them, coming headfirst down the ladder like a gigantic spider. He hissed as he moved. Cooper saw raw muscle, distorted tissue.

Cooper ran. The Hellhound had arrived.

Starck, staggering, came after him.

Miller knelt, opening the last of the charges, flipping the switch. This was the important one, marked with a red radio sigil. There was a second switch inside the container. He flipped it. A small cover popped open.

Carefully, he reached inside and removed a small radio detonator. This system had been built with fail-safes in mind, granting the possibility that the computer-controlled systems might be offline or destroyed. In an emergency the Event Horizon’s crew could have made it home to Earth, given that they were still within this solar system, or to landfall on any seemingly hospitable planet.

There were two buttons on the radio detonator, one green, one red. He pressed the green button.

Red lights glowed through the gloom of the corridor, marking the location of the couplings. He was almost down at the First Containment now. He would be racing the clock to get back to the Gravity Couch Bay before the gravity drive activated.

He found an intercom panel, keyed it. “We’re armed, she’s ready to blow,”

he said. “Repeat, we are armed.”

There was no reply from the intercom. “Starck, you copy? Cooper?”

He swore under his breath. The only thing he could do now was run like hell and hope he made it.

He turned.

The corridor flared with red light, and heat washed over him.

The burning man had returned, filling the corridor with fire from wall to wall, blocking Miller’s escape.

“You left me behind,” the burning man hissed, his voice crackling and popping like flaring tinderwood.

“Corrick…” Miller said, afraid.

“I begged you. I begged you to save me.”

“I couldn’t,” Miller said. Was there any hope that Corrick would ever understand? Did it matter? In his heart, he had always expected that amends would someday be due. “Do you think I didn’t want to?”

“You abandoned me. You stood there and did nothing.” The voice crackled with anger and the flames brightened momentarily. The heat was threatening to suffocate Miller.