" Do it!" Mohini commanded.
Ruchi gave her a determined nods and exited the control room. She had the permission she needed to incinerate that goddamned head. She couldn't wait to get to the lab, to consign it to a fiery death.
Ruchi failed to notice that Vice Captain Sudhir who was right beside Captain Mohini, monitoring the horrifying events in the engine room and keeping an eye on the ships vitals, had quietly slipped out and was shadowing her, as she made her way towards the lab.
The Z1000 display case hosting the head was capable of many tasks, not just storage. It could analyse the chemical constituents of an object, disinfect it, perform dissections and of course, destroy it. Most importantly all this could be done with the flick of a button. This was a boon to Ruchi, who did not want to touch the head.
She found this new found terror of the maligned body part at odds with her intellect, everything that her scientific training had taught her.
Yet, here she was, in front of the head. In the grip of a terror that had transformed her from a scientist to a cowering Stone Age cavewoman.
The things she had seen. The things that happened on the ship. That Was happening on the ship currently. All leading to one undeniable truth.
There was no scientific language, no scientific methodology that could help explain the head's vile influence and deadly intentions. She did not want to spend one more precious moment with an invisible serial killer on this ship.
Space station Sudarshana was a few hours away and she did not want this curse to be preserved and passed over to other scientists and the innocent residents of Sudarshana.
So she did not waste a second. She accessed the panel on the Z1000 unit and toggled through the different menus presented to her onscreen, to bring up the destruction protocol.
She felt her sense of dread heighten. The eyes on the head was closed, but she it was not fooling anyone. She knew it was sentient, capable of great harm.
She chose the incineration mode and waited for the sequence to load up.
<enter your id>
She put her name in.
<enter security pin>
She typed in the 14 digit strong number she had memorised and used several times while operating dangerous equipment in the lab.
Initiate incineration mode. YES , NO.
She didn't think twice before pressing yes.
She stepped back and waited. The progress bar slowly inched towards completion as the equipment warmed up.
What would her scientist parents think of her at this moment. Her mum was a xeno-archaeologist and her father was geneticist. She grew in a house where the mere mention of stories about ghosts would have been scoffed at by her father.
"When you have a perplexing problem, do not resort to your baser instincts, view things through the lens of science," her father would tell her.
But her mother was always supportive of alternative methodologies, other ways of looking at things.
"Trust your guts Ruchi. Know that we don't have all the answers. If the cave drawings that I find regularly is anything to go by...," her mother would stop and look at her father. "And I drew conclusions from it and put it in a scientific paper. I would be a laughing stock. But the possibility remains that our ancestors may have worshipped deities that may be extraterrestrial in origin," she would say pointing to the sky.
YOU ARE READING
Meru
Horror(Complete) Indian mythology inspired horror story set in space featuring a toxic love triangle. INSO Dwaraka, the Indian National Space Organisation's most advanced mining spaceship has had its share of tragedies, but when they retrieve a mysterious...
