Super SciFi Smackdown

7.1 Grief

Dana shook uncontrollably as she knelt over Xacks' broken body. How had everything gone so wrong so quickly? Scott's sudden appearance had unhinged her once calm, (if not unshaken) resolve. Now the dead human who had tried to infect her was back and on top of everything else that had just happened, it was all too much. She could only watch on with shaking limbs and heaving lungs as the zombie tore through the remaining enemies, oblivious to the damage they wrought upon his own body. When the last of the invaders lay broken spilling bodily fluids on the floor, her former companion reached a hand to her.

Her involuntary revulsion caused an instinctive recoil and the walking flesh pile stopped short. His dead eyes were full of life but still no light shone behind them. Dana wanted so badly to tear her gaze away but they held her like a rabbit in the headlight. After a minute of her refusing his hand, he withdrew it, to her relief.

"I will be outside." Scott spoke slowly, his voice not quite reflecting his once natural form. "We have much to do."

Dana sat sobbing with grief, confused and disorientated by everything, wishing thoroughly that she would cease to exist. After several minutes of facing the reality before her, while not spontaneously winking from existence, the smell of meat, no longer living and the sight of exposed tendons in Xacks' corpse contracting after death, forced her up. Her chest ached with a ferocity that spread into her arms and it hurt to breathe. Still she was way too old to start holding her breath in protest, waiting for the universe to do things her way. Instead she took one last look at the destruction of so much life, including that of her friends and remove herself on shaky legs, to stand in the crisp alien air.

As she sat on the exit ramp, Dana wanted sorely not to look at a strange planet. She didn't want to have to think about new ideas and for the first time since leaving the earth, she wished she was home. What she wouldn't give at this moment to be back at work, in her mundane job, to be able to switch off into the familiar. But there was nothing familiar here. Every little detail was strange and new, from the colors, to the textures of the alien flora. It made her miss the company all the more.

"You will have to move." Scott voice was loud and clear even though he hadn't turned to face her. "We will need to bring the machinery out that way."

It was clear that the fight was not over yet and for a minute Dana considered asking what to expect, but grief clouded her feeling of self worth and she decided against it.

"You're not Scott are you?" She asked instead.

"I am simply a peripheral of the one you call Zero." He stated plainly.

"Zero?" Dana was normally quick to catch on, maybe it was the shock she was still suffering but this made no sense to her. "How can you be Zero?"

"I am merely another arm of myself." He concluded as though that explained it all and proceeded to go about unloading a device with the help of Zero's other body.

Dana decided to stop trying to fill in the blanks on her own and wait for the answers to come to her. Instead she turned her thoughts to fighting and whether or not she really wanted to. She was half way to deciding to fight when it occurred to her that the machinery was not at all weapon like. It was far too fiddly and delicate as they set it on the soft spongy ground and began feeding tendrils into the moss like covering that seemed to blanket everything.

"What is that?" Dana'a curiosity drew her further out of her grief evoked despair as she began to regain her fighting spirit.

"It's a data transfer machine." This time it was the mech's speaker that Zero used to reply. "I'm going to transfer the data to this planet, thus freeing me to pursue other actions."

"You will have to do better than that!" Dana scolded. "Remember I don't have all the puzzle pieces you do. Tell me are they coming here?"

"No one else will pursue us here." The metal humanoid stated matter of factly.

"How can you be sure?" Dana asked with more than a hint of skepticism, given all that had happened.

"I used a time cloak to hide our presence." Zero stated. "Only the ship caught in the bubble with us could pinpoint our position."

"So where are they then?" Dana was starting to regret asking. "Surely they didn't all leave their ship."

"I reset the cloak. They are shut out of our time bracket now."

In a split second decision Dana decided she didn't care. Zero apparently had it under control, or at least he didn't seem at all fazed and now he could use the undead corpse of Scott to do his bidding. Most of all Dana just wanted to curl up with a bottle of wine and then sleep it off. Slipping back up the ramp and into the hold, she made her way to Knapp's cargo crate. Without looking towards Xacks she plucked a bottle and retreated outside once more. She would have like to get into her own bed, however the pile of death that blocked the narrow hallway was a strong persuasion against such a move. Instead she found a comfortable spot nestled in some foliage and proceeded to drink herself into a stupor.

The light had an ambient effect and the planets natural pastel colorings were pleasing to the eye. Enough so that exhaustion and stress seem to slip away leaving only that deep central ache, and even that was dulled by the wine. Looking at the ship, she realized it wasn't going anywhere in a hurry with a large tick like enemy pod embedded into the top of it. So that's how they got in, she thought to herself as she shut her eyes to the world and drifted into a troubled sleep.