The Birth of The Unity (sequel to Chronicle of Nautilus)

Chapter 20: The Enemy

The view inside the control room surprised Adam. From the entrance to the fast travel pipe by the massive wall screen at the other end of the room, it seemed, a giant worm had crawled and deformed everything in a wide 'U' shape. Consoles, tables and everything else was leveled or split into a half in the worm's path. The computer he used daily, had been stretched upwards and to the side as if would not be made of metal and electronics but clay.

At the furthest corners of the room, Grant and Patty sat in their chairs, their glassy eyes opened wide and frozen. Kurt lay on a table two meters away from the damaged inventory, his back slightly bent to the opposite side than it should be. Keira's deformed body rammed a deformed column. Her fate was similar to Adam's computer, only where the skin had reached its stretching limit her guts splattered all over the floor. Harris was nowhere to be seen.

"What happened here?" shouted Adam at the two frozen subordinates. But they only sat not twitching a muscle and said nothing even though he repeated the question multiple times.

At the end of the 'U' shaped path, the console under which lay the fast travel pipe had been rooted out of the ground and flown at least five meters to the side. Looking down at the hole into which even the largest man could fit Adam shivered. A creature that went in there frightened him. He did not feel ready to face it.

For a moment, he turned out the fear, grabbed a mask out of a cavity inside the pipe, covered his face and jumped. When the fear turned back on he was already sliding, his insides twisting and turning to different directions.

He and Grover had already tried one of the fast moving pipes before. It connected a seemingly random room on the first floor with the park on the fourth. That fall felt pleasant and exciting. This one felt horrifying and nerve wrecking. He did not want to meet the person at its end.

Adam rolled out of the pipe into the strangest room. After removing the mask and taking the first breath inside, he coughed. The wet air made taking deep breaths impossible. Adam quickly adjusted and respired in fast, small gulps. A thick fog covered the room as far he could see and he saw no further than two dozen steps forward.

An inclined wall arced upwards from behind his back. It contained points of blue light scattered in a pattern of one-meter step to all directions. In front of him, a grated six-meter wide path split into three equal parts. On the left, it branched to the stairway down and on the right into a stairway up. All three paths currently led to a wall of fog. On rare occasions, Adam felt a weak breeze in the ship corridors. Here, a warm wind blew from right to left adding to the room strangeness.

For a long while, he listened to the silence trying to track movements of the powerful invader but all he heard every now and then were wind gusts far below. Placing his feet carefully so he would produce as little sound as possible he walked forward deeper and deeper into the thickening fog. With every twenty steps, he lost a single step of vision. But he did not go more than two hundred steps before reaching the end. There, only a railing the height of his knees separated him from the white abyss.

"Booo-o-h," a voice ringed inside Adam's head and sent shivers down his spine.

He took two steps back and shouted at nothingness, "I know you are here. Do not hide. Face me like a man!"

The voice now spoke inside his head and as an echo from below, "If you want to speak with me. You will have to come down. I am at the center."

Taking his time, walking down stairways, Adam felt both: fear of death and excitement to learn about the room, about the twisted world view of his enemy. He had no backup plan, no tricks hidden up his sleeve, only a lethal gun tucked behind his back, which he had never fired in his life. Adam adjusted weapon position so he could easier draw it with the right hand and removed the safety.