The Suggestion Box (Volume 1)

Part 5: The Vega Effect (4)

Based on the following Suggestions:

Names: Scander, Latisha, Ashuria, Scarlet
Times: afternoon/early evening
Places: USO outpost on Vega 12, Unigivla
Objects: Numbers

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They checked around the houses, but nothing moved. Their filter-hoods registered no critical levels of any kind in the air.

SCREEEE!

Scander jumped into the air and landed with his finger on the trigger of his gun. Latisha stood with what looked like a small satellite dish in her hand. She slapped it on the side.

"Sorry," she said, "this thing still has a few bugs, but I think I can get an accurate re—"

SQUEEEE!

Her words were drowned out by a second squeal. Scander clenched his jaw and glared at her.

"Go read somewhere else!" he hissed through clenched teeth. He tossed her a commlink unit. "On second thought, you stay here with the droid and figure out what those numbers mean. Call me when you have something."

Latisha's mouth fell. "But—"

"No. It's your fault for stowing along when I told you not to."

Latisha sighed and plopped down onto a crate standing behind her. "Fine," she groaned.

Scander and Ashuria walked among the buildings, which looked more and more like they were the houses of the settlers. Most of them had lawns scattered with toys and hoses, like they had been enjoying normal life when it came to a bloody end.

"It's like everyone just sort of died where they stood," Ashuria remarked, as their search turned up more bloody foot and handprints (even some wide, circular areas that could have only been made by a face gushing blood from every orefice) than anything else. It was like the natural red rock of Vega was showing through the grey cement.

"Where are the bodies, then?" Scander remarked to his partner. At the very least, there should be skeletons all over the place, but the bloody prints and the discarded everyday items were the only signs that living beings had been here.

Ashuria nudged a large blue ball laying in the middle of the floor with her foot. There was another bloody handprint, a small one this time. She shuddered as the fleeting image of the child who had played with this toy floated through her mind. She saw the child, sitting peacefully, maybe giggling as he played—as the mysterious cause took his life.

"Vega claimed them," she whispered.

"What was that?" Scander called from another room in the house.

"Nothing!" Ashuria replied. She pressed her lips tightly as they continued their grisly tour.

Scander had just arrived at the decision to recall the other two and pack it in when his commlink squawked.

"Corporal!" The shriek that issued from the speaker could hardly be termed human.

Scander froze and locked eyes with Ashuria; was it a glitch? Had the call really been meant for him—or was there another corporal in the area?

"Corporal Hawke!" the banshee repeated.

There was no doubt as to who was calling. Scander grabbed the microphone. "Latisha!" he called. Had something grabbed her and was it now using her equipment to locate him?

A feral cackle answered him. "It's in the numbers! Twelve, twenty-six, ninety! Haha! Science! Six, two, eight, nine! We couldn't have known! Sixty million, twelve thousand, seventy-six, haha! Two thousand one hundred seventy-three! Foolish three! We three did not see!" She broke off from her babbling to laugh again. "The red touch! The mark of Vega! Eight point thirty-six to five and three quarters!"