Phillip Peterson - The Dark Ship

“You were lucky that Green’s deflective shield was broken.”

Joanne shrugged. “I only found out about your protection fairly late. I’d been wondering why I couldn’t take over any of you. I tried it with you, too.”

The headaches he’d had—that they’d all had! It had been the demon’s unsuccessful attempts to possess them.

“And then you pretended to be the computer. A clever idea.”

“Yes—that was a lot of fun. Improv theatre, so to speak. But some of Irons’ questions got me into a bit of a sweat.”

“And who put the food outside the door?”

Joanne laughed loudly. “That was particularly amusing. I sent one of the ship’s avatars and dissolved it as soon as it had knocked on the door. You should have seen your faces!”

Jeff shivered as Joanne’s hand caressed his face almost tenderly.

“Actually I wanted to kill you and not Irons that night. But when the Major told you about the codes on the device, I changed my plans.”

“You were listening in?”

“Of course! I heard every word you spoke.”

Jeff shook his head. “Then why didn’t you kill me and have the Major bring the handheld to the center of the ship?”

“Irons was too stubborn for me. He might have destroyed the thing too soon.”

“So why didn’t you just kill me later and have Green bring you the device with my finger? You didn’t know about the password any more than I did.”

Joanne nodded eagerly. “That’s true. I didn’t know. But I thought I could turn it into a nice little game and kill you all, one by one, until only you were left. The fact that you guessed the password was a stroke of luck. I never would have thought of it myself. But it was fun, wasn’t it?” The demon moved his face even closer, so that Jeff could smell Joanne’s breath. He needed all the willpower he could muster not to turn his head to the side.

“Then you sabotaged Owl’s and Joanne’s suits,” he said.

“Yes, that was easy. All I had to do was break the connections to the shields and then I was able break their spirits.”

There were no bounds to this creature’s evil!

But he had to keep him talking until he came up with an idea. His mind was racing. “One more thing—in the first cavity we found the bones in the mass grave. Were they from the avatars?”

The demon shook his head. “Those were real humans. I didn’t put all of them in cryogenic pods. I took some of them straight to the cavitys to experiment with them. But it wasn’t much fun because they broke too quickly. It’s more fun to slowly destroy the soul than to quickly break the body.”

Joanne stroked his cheeks again. “But now we’ve chatted enough. Let’s finally have some fun.” The demon leaned over him and before Jeff could react, kissed him on the mouth. He could feel Joanne’s tongue on his lips, which he pressed together as tightly as he could.

Finally the demon laughed, pulled back his head, and stood up. He went to the back of the capsule and rummaged around in a compartment. “Of course, we need protection. You always need to protect yourself during sex, that’s what I’ve learned.” He chuckled and returned to Jeff. In his hand he was holding a thin, silver metal cylinder that looked like a pen.

“What’s that?” Jeff asked as his heart started to beat faster.

“Just something to help you relax. So that I can take off your suit more easily. Don’t worry, you won’t be completely unconscious. You’ll still be able to enjoy the sex. I promise you: it will be the best sex you’ve ever had!” He cackled as he approached Jeff’s face with the syringe.

Jeff looked down at his bound feet and then at the window, which was literally right in front of him. He had an idea. His suit was deactivated, so he couldn’t save himself, but if it worked, at least the demon would be destroyed once and for all. And he wouldn’t have to be the demon’s sexual plaything. He had only one chance. He was running out of time.

Jeff stretched out and lifted his feet as far as he could. Then he writhed around until he was lying half on his side. The shackles cut into his skin and he cried out in pain. Then he tilted his feet and kicked.

“What are you doing?” the demon asked reprovingly. “You’ll only hurt yourself and you won’t achieve anything.”

Jeff kicked as hard as his bound legs would allow. The diamond tips of his boots struck the window full force.

A loud crunching noise penetrated his ear, as if a hundred demons were dragging their fingers across slates. Then there was an almighty crash as the window shattered into thousands of pieces. A storm raged through the cabin and began to suck them out.

Joanne’s body was ripped into the air. For a moment the demon tried to cling to Jeff’s seat, but the vacuum was too strong. With a silent scream, the demon was sucked out of the window into the eternity of space. It was the last thing Jeff saw before he fell unconscious.

The first thing he felt was amazement that he had awoken.

Shouldn’t he be dead? Suffocated and frozen by the vacuum of space?

When he opened his eyes, he realized he was still sitting in the escape pod, tied to his chair.

The window?

There was no more window. A big, metal plate covered the hole where it had been.

An emergency cover!

Like on the ships of the Imperial fleet—the aliens had also provided their windows with emergency covers that were activated automatically when the windows were damaged. Unlucky for the demon that it hadn’t closed faster.

Jeff managed to wriggle his hands out of the shackles, which seemed to have been loosened slightly by the storm in the cabin. Once he had freed his hands, it was easy for him to remove the other restraints.

Jeff stood up with a groan. His head was throbbing. He looked at the undamaged window to his right. Countless stars studded the sky.

The demon was dead—and this time for good. For all eternity, he would drift through space in Joanne’s body as a dried, frozen corpse.

Jeff stood up and searched the cabin for anything that might be useful. He found a packet of some green substance that might be alien food, but he didn’t feel like trying it. His suit would have to keep him alive; he reached down to the switch on his chest that activated the life-support system. A beep confirmed that it was on.

Jeff went to the back of the cabin and stood in front of one of the open cryogenic pods. The bottom of the container was filled with a greenish liquid. If he got into it, he would sleep the whole way back to Earth. But he only toyed with the idea for a second. He couldn’t bring himself to lie down in one of those alien pods that had already caused so much misery and misfortune. He would manage to while away the hundred days back to Earth.

Instead, he simply lay down on the floor next to the hatch. And suddenly he had a thought. What would happen when he left hyperspace in a few months and entered Earth’s Solar System? He no longer had Irons’ handheld with the authorization codes. In the worst-case scenario, the Orbital Space Guard would shoot him down as he approached Earth.

Or had Jerry transferred the correct code to the onboard computer of the escape pod? He had no idea.

Overwhelmed by tiredness, Jeff closed his eyes.

He would find out soon enough.

“Transport? Transport to where, Sir?” — “Possibly straight to hell!”

An extraterrestrial object is discovered off the coast of California; a sphere that transports humans to other solar systems. Death-row inmate Russell Harris and nine other convicts are given the chance to save their lives by agreeing to travel as test subjects on the transporter. But when the first volunteer dies a gruesome death, it becomes clear to Russell and his comrades that the venture is little more than a merciless death mission on which they will all perish. Their only chance of survival is to uncover the secret of the mysterious object, but that too seems hopeless—because no trace of the transporter’s constructors can be found