Zahra stomped her foot. “Will you shut up and push something so we can leave!” Yana hovered her left hand over the stick and wiggled her fingers. Zahra was done. “Yana!”
The Russian flinched and grabbed the stick to keep from slipping off the seat. The display around Yana flashed red, and then a symbol popped up that, of course, no one could read.
“And that’s my cue,” Yana said, throwing her right leg over the seat and leaping down.
“How many did you press?” Hammet asked.
Yana winced. “All of them?”
Zahra closed her eyes, dipped her head, and shook it. “Wonderful.”
“We need to go,” Hammet said.
Zahra opened her eyes and shouted, “Ya think?”
There was no telling what Yana had pushed, but either way, it wasn’t good.
The trio ran for the exit but stopped when the floor began to tremble. They stopped and looked at one another. Zahra figured it out first.
“Um, I don’t think that was the weapons systems.” She eyed Hammet, then Yana. “I think that was the flight controls.”
A voice spoke with a sound like an amalgamation of many voices at once — a whisper, a deeper male voice, and a sort of gravely scream. The language, of course, was alien.
Hammet backed away. “Is it just me, or does that sound like a countdown?”
“A countdown to what?” Yana asked.
Zahra pushed them forward.
“A countdown to what?” Yana repeated.
Zahra met eyes with her as they moved. “To launch.”
They hustled out of the room and reentered the hallway.
“All the way down here?” Hammet asked.
“At this point,” Zahra replied, “I wouldn’t put anything past these things.” She backhanded his shoulder. “But hey, on the bright side, looks like we’ll destroy this place after all.”
“And ourselves!” Yana retorted. Her face was frozen in terror. “Why are you so cheery about it?”
Zahra tried and failed to extinguish her maniacal smile. “Oh, I’m not. I’m terrified!”
Yana and Hammet led the way back into the central corridor. Yana focused on the cables running along the center of the wide floor. The worst thing she could do was get turned around and lost. She kept to the left of them, and Hammet kept to the right.
At the halfway point, Zahra was still lagging behind them both but had quickly come out of her mental funk. She’d been through a lot, and Yana couldn’t blame her brain for taking a nap.
Yana looked back and stumbled. She grabbed for the left-hand wall to brace herself, and when she touched it, it vanished, and she fell. The wall hadn’t been a wall at all — but rather a door.
She landed hard on her left side. “Dammit.”
“You okay?” Zahra asked, reaching down and gripping her coat. She helped Yana up.
Then they froze.
“Oh, shit,” Zahra whispered.
The contents on the other side of the room definitely qualified as an “oh, shit” moment. The two women, still clutching one another, stepped inside.
“We don’t have time for this,” Hammet hissed. But even his voice trailed off at seeing what they had.
“It’s an onboard lab!” Zahra said.
But this lab hadn’t belonged to the owners of this spacecraft. This was man-made. The room had been hijacked by the Sixth Seal and turned into one. And there, in the center of it all, were two hospital gurneys, though one was much larger than the other.
And they were occupied.
Yana stepped closer, but Zahra didn’t let go. “We don’t—”
The Russian ripped out of Zahra’s grip. She looked at her. “I have to see this.”
“We—” Hammet started.
Zahra held up a hand, silencing him. She nodded at the German before turning back to Yana. “Quickly.”
From just inside the doorway, Zahra and Hammet quietly watched Yana cross the laboratory. Unlike the pod chamber and the bridge, this room was of
The floor quaked harder now. Zahra knew she and Hammet should have dragged Yana down the hallway kicking and screaming, but something told her to let the Russian do this. Her eyes had been laser-focused, and her face had been sincere.
Yana really did need to do this.
“Project Fleshgod?” Hammet asked.
“Yeah. I think this might’ve been the ground floor.”
“Mengele’s lab?”
She nodded.
Hammet stepped back. He was as uncomfortable as anyone being here.
Yana stepped up to the larger body first.
“What do you see?” Zahra asked.
“Definitely one of the aliens,” Yana replied. “Probably from the open pod.” She pointed at its right side and sneered in disgust. “I think its arm is missing.”
Yana continued around to the two subjects’ heads. She stepped closer, reached out, and gripped the heavy sheets lying on top of them, one with each hand.
“Here we go…”
She lifted the sheets.
