I am not your load to bear - Chapter 12 (Early Access) (Patreon)

Tristan

Forget everything Tristan had ever said about using Bexley like a fleshlight. The dude was heavy.

Blood dripped off the end of his short locs. The wound didn’t appear deep, not that Tristan had a third hand to dig around his hair with for a full inspection. And what did he do if it was down to the bone? If brain was showing? Either way all he could do was drag Bexley to someone qualified to treat him. Tristan was qualified to drag heavy shit.

With fifty fucking alarms screaming, water and oily substances trickling through walls and across the dented floors, Tristan struggled to tell forward from backward. Every corridor looked the same; every door was clicking and flashing like a damn traffic light. It couldn’t be helping matters that Bexley wasn’t the only one to bump his head in the crash. Tristan’s noggin was throbbin’ and his legs were staggering as he carried Bexley through the ship.

Groaning echoed round the corner, tugging at Tristan’s chest like a rope and forcing him to move faster. They had passed two dead crew members already, bodies crushed under collapsed walls and floors. The floor lurched and Tristan stumbled, narrowly avoiding slamming Bexley into the wall, taking the hit with his hip and shoulder instead with a grunt. He pushed on, following the sounds of pain coming from ahead.

Third smack was a charm to get the next door open. Tristan was too impatient to try and time it with the flashes. There was no pattern to it anyway. The doors were fucked.

On the other side, ceiling-high racks had toppled over and into one another. Tufts of hair poked through shelves and joinery. Under the dim emergency lighting it could either be red or brown. The occasional groan shook the hair but not the piles of metal that had stacked haphazardly over it. Tristan hurried closer, searching a second for a safe place to set Bexley while he dug for the groaner. The options weren’t great. He settled on a crate nearest the door; it appeared to be intact to the eye at least. Tristan laid Bexley’s short ass over it, head against wood and feet dangling. Next, he pried his way through the metal debris, narrowly avoiding a jab too many times. The closer he got to the hair, the quieter the pained noises became.

“Hello?” he yelled. “Don’t go dying on me when I’m this close to reaching ya’!”

“You human?” was the grunted response.

Tristan shouldered a splintered metal bar out of the way. “Yeah, you got a problem with that?”

“Nah, man, just thanking God you are.”

“I don’t believe in that guy,” Tristan called back, drawing closer step-by-step and dislodged-debris-by-dislodged-debris. “But if you want to throw in a reward request to that prayer, I’ll sure take some prize money from him.”

There was a croaky, coughing laugh that let Tristan pinpoint the right rack to lift - it shook a little with the man’s humour. With a heave, and groaning noises from all three: Tristan, the injured man, and the metal, the man was freed.

“Can you walk?”

“I’m sorry,” the man answered, and he really looked it.

“Okay.” Tristan hesitated for a few seconds, bracing his body while his brain was wracked with the noise of a crashed ship. The guy was bulky, but Tristan could drag him for sure. “This might hurt.”

“It already hurts, how much worse can it get?”

Apparently, a lot. The man was hissing and huffing and cursing into Tristan’s ear with every step, but also obviously doing his best to keep his pain to himself. There was nothing Tristan could do, so he also took the manly route of shutting the hell up. Bexley was still out cold, so thankfully he was also silent. He had the smaller man under one arm, with the new guy slouched over his back when he approached the door to get back out into the corridor.

“Be careful,” the new guy said through gritted teeth. “They’re out there.”

“Who?”

“Aliens.”

“Are you delirious, man?” He gave the door pad a kick. The timing was off, and it didn’t unlock, flashing a mocking green and red at him. “We’ve been working with aliens this whole-”

“No.” He was breathless but wouldn’t let it stop him. “Aliens with guns.”

Tristan hadn’t wanted to wind the guy with small talk, but he needed to know what the fuck he was talking about. “You saw Ailu’t with guns?”

“Yeah, dressed all in black, like combat shit. They were taking out the leftovers.”

He kicked the door pad again and this time it opened. “Leftovers?”

“Humans that didn’t die in the drop.”

The blaring alarms hit him in the face full-force back in the corridor. Overhead lights crackled, and door lights flashed, and now sweat was getting into his eyes, too. “How did you not get hit?”

“Faked dead. Already looked it.”

That he did, but Tristan wasn’t going to say it; he could barely catch his breath to ask the important questions.

“Our Ailu’t or different?”

“How the fuck can you tell? They’re all blue.”

“Sure,” Tristan grunted. “But no one you recognised?”

“Don’t think so.”

So they were under attack. Fan-fucking-tastic. Tristan tried to keep his sigh under his breath. An accident was tragic, but a targeted attack meant this shit wasn’t even over. There he thought he’d gotten lucky in surviving the crash, but now he could be hunted down like an animal. That was, as long as the guy hanging from his neck wasn’t concussed and making the whole thing up.

The man wheezed, “What’s your name, buddy?” over Tristan’s shoulder.

“Tristan. What’s yours?”

“Pax. And who’s the little fella?”

“Bexley.”

“He dead?”

“Not yet.”

The man grumbled his approval. They continued their shuffle past closed doors, heading inwards. The central staircases would tell Tristan which direction was safe to head in, and then he could decide where to try for. Medical bay? Canteen? Security offices?

A clunk and a yell that sounded like it should have been a curse word announced the entrance of a security officer’s uniform through one of the flashing doors. Officer Sovereign planted her knee and elbow over the door slot to keep it from closing as another person pulled themselves free of a dark closet.

“Aliens!” Pax hissed.

A gun hung from Officer Sovereign’s belt, but her clothes were navy rather than black. The pair looked scratched and busted up. Tristan trusted his gut.

“Officer Sovereign!” he yelled out. Pax struggled against him in horror-filled squirming. "It's okay," Tristan grunted at him.

Officer Sovereign and the second woman turned in unison. One security uniform and one medic’s uniform. Tristan didn’t recognise the purple-haired medic, but the emblem on her shoulder was like an oasis in the desert. Maybe those prayers had been worth something after all.

“I’ve got two injured,” Tristan gasped out.

Both women leapt into action, hurrying to him to relieve his burden and begin physical tests. Tristan brushed them both away from him after lowering his charges. “They’re the injured ones, not me.” All he’d been afflicted with was a sore back. He squatted between the two men and let his head hang for a bit. The medic was taking Bexley’s pulse, so Tristan kept his mouth shut while she counted.

“Be careful with your wrist,” Officer Sovereign advised quietly.

“It’s only… ah, I always forget this word in English…” The medic looked to Tristan. “Spring?”

“Sprained?”

“Yes! Only sprained.” She cradled it close to her body, but continued to use it when Officer Sovereign wasn’t watching.

“We need to find somewhere to make a hub, somewhere we can bring the injured for treatment,” Officer Sovereign announced. She was laying Pax out flat on his back, keeping his head and limbs straight. He looked petrified. “There must be many.”

“Like a base?” the other woman asked. Her hands were now feeling over Bexley’s head with tender touches. The word ‘Parity’ was stitched to the front pocket of her shirt.

“Exactly. Then those without medical experience-” She gave Tristan a short, but not unkind, look. “-can help with collection.”

“Sounds good to me,” he huffed. “But I heard we were under attack.”

Officer Sovereign froze. The medic looked to her, her expression almost at the level of fear that Pax had painted across his face. She managed to shake off her shock to demand, “Everything. Tell me everything.”

Tristan did his best while the women attended to the injured; although, there wasn’t much they could do without supplies. Pax had some bone sticking out of his leg that the medic covered with a tightly bound stretch of fabric off his shirt. For Bexley, they’d know how badly he’d hurt his head once he woke up. When Tristan finished offering the little information he had, Sovereign was solemn.

“This explains why the door code kept being over-written,” she murmured.

Parity chewed at her lip and continued feeling around Pax’s chest.

Tristan looked between them. “What?”

“When I tried to get us out of that small room, I put my security codes into the door to stop the…” Sovereign searched the air for the right words. “Open. Close. Open. Close.” Tristan nodded. “And it would work, until someone else overrode it. It is not a… mistake in the system. If my codes work, then there is someone else using their codes against mine to put it back into this flashing state.”

“You’re saying our attackers have access to the ship’s security system?”

“That’s a disastrous possibility, but yes.”

Tristan stared down the hallway, trying to think of something to say. He never was one for big ideas.

“Cargo Loader Tristan, have you met Medic Parity?” Sovereign asked. He wasn’t sure if she could tell he was spiralling, but the interruption did help.

“I haven’t, and it’s a pleasure.” He gave Parity a grim smile; she returned it. “But can we drop the titles? I don’t have the energy for this.”

“Fine.”

“What are their names?” Parity enquired; she was very soothingly spoken.

“Pax and Bexley,” Tristan answered, pointing at each like he was picking out fruit at a market.

“Hello, Pax.”

Pax didn’t answer, but his expression did the talking for him.

“I’m not going to hurt you.”

Pax was obviously not convinced.

Parity frowned. “Why would I give you medical care if I was going to kill you?”

The soothing tone did not soften the effect these words had on Pax, who immediately began struggling again.

“Okay!” Tristan hissed. “Enough talk, we shouldn’t linger or someone who does mean us harm might turn up.”

The women nodded and stood, a little creakily. They must have taken some bruises and bumps in the crash. Tristan took Pax up by the pits and Sovereign slung Bexley over her shoulder. Parity hesitated at her side, murmuring something. The words ‘delirious’ and ‘true’ were all Tristan caught.

“I believe him,” he snapped.

The woman glanced back.

“I think…” Sovereign’s eyes slid over the group, weighing them up. “That is the safest thing to do.”

A silent power exchange took place as they began their trek as group, and Sovereign became the leader. She checked the corners before they turned them, pointed her gun into the dark spaces when they heard a noise, and attempted to forge a path up the collapsed staircases. Each attempt to move levels was thwarted by twisted metal spikes and deformed steps. After hours of walking, or dragging themselves, there were only two sets still to try. Sovereign was marking off their route on her busted little 'communicator' - a baby tablet that only had maybe three functions. She added weird symbols for the really destroyed areas and took notes from any working control panel they passed. Tristan got the feeling, cold along his neck, that Sovereign had bad news she didn't want to share. That the control panels had informed her of something he wouldn't want to hear - but needed to. He would wait until they had found their 'base' to ask.

The only people they came across were dead, with a human majority, but there were some blue corpses too. Parity checked every one. Sovereign took any weapons or water bottles nearby, using Bexley like a sling to carry them against her back.

At the base of the front-most stairs, partly crushed but in much better condition than all others so far, someone was breathing.

"Hey!" Tristan called out.

The head turned. A woman, with short hair shaved around the ears and shit loads of gold stabbed through her ears, was sprawled over the last step and the floor. She looked like she'd just woken up.

"Are you injured?" Sovereign asked.

"Try not to move!" Parity ordered at the same time.

The woman groaned and pulled herself up to her elbows; Tristan could see they were trembling from down the hall. "I’m okay, just bounced off every surface and lost my leg. Could be worse, I guess?

"Lost your leg?!" Parity yelped, leaping forward and running to perform medical assistance. What she intended to re-attach a leg with, when they had zero medical supplies (did water that other people might have back-washed into count?), Tristan didn't know.

The woman looked around, stretching her neck and wincing as she did. Parity dropped to her side and began faffing with her cargo pants. "Yeah, it’s over there." The woman pointed to a black shoe a few metres away. Tucked into it was a metal leg with a rounded top, amongst the debris it blended perfectly. "Give us a hand, would ya’?"

Tristan tilted over with a grunt at Pax's weight doubling the pressure on his knees. He snatched up the leg, wiggling it free of a fallen wall panel. "I’ll do you one better-" He held it out by the foot. "I can give you a-"

"I’ll give you a slap if you finish that joke." She snatched the leg back and Parity watched in wonder as she re-attached it. Her open staring at the woman's stump (that ended a heavily tattooed thigh) caused obvious offence, but the woman didn't tell her off. Once she was four-limbed again, the woman's cuts and grazes became the focus of Parity's fussing.

"What's your name?" Tristan asked.

"Neri."

"What's your placement?" asked Sovereign.

"Cargo loader."

"What allergies do you have?" asked Parity.

Neri gave her a dry look. "Nutjobs, nutcases and tree nuts."

Parity nodded, dead serious.

Now a team of six, they traversed the staircase by carrying Pax and Bexley between two people each. It was more of a climb than anything, like dragging someone with frostbitten feet up Everest with you.

At the top of the stairs, they paused before continuing up higher.

"The Commander's office," Sovereign murmured. "We can send a distress message." She pointed to a door at the end of the hall, the very front of the ship. Probably a pretty cushy view.

The view wasn't all that. Craters and cracks of the big rock they'd crashed into, and Commander Laurel face down on the command centre, a gunshot wound to the back of her blonde head.

A rally of gunfire brought them out of their group trance, all staring at the bleeding braid that wrapped around the back of Commander Laurel's skull. Sovereign took off, gun drawn, and the others followed. Pax in Tristan's arms and Bexley in Neri's.