If they weren’t dead before the collision, they were taken care by it. There was a huge hole in the side of the ship and then comes the marker floating right in. All the while my team and I go to work, looking frantic pushing buttons and turning knobs to try and avoid explosive decompression. A security detail was dispatched to the shuttle to check it out and an engineering group to look at the damage. I don’t know exactly what happened to them, but I’m also pretty sure I don’t want to know. Power suddenly went down through the whole ship and I sprang into action. Checking circuits and wiring, tracking every synapse of the ship’s electrical system and never finding a problem. I was deeply entrenched in this project when the propaganda started over all the screens and loud speakers. “FOR YOUR SAFETY, DURING THE BLACKOUT STAY IN YOUR QUARTERS. IF YOU ARE NOT IN YOUR QUARTERS, LEAVE YOUR POSITIONS AND GO THERE NOW. I REPEAT…”

Every deck of the ship had saferooms fully equipped with retina scanners to take census. There was no reason to confine people to their quarters. That was my first clue that something extreme was happening. I stopped my team from going back to their quarters, advising them that I was overriding that order on the necessity of fixing the blackout. I led them to the bowels of the ship ignoring their questions as to what could be down there that could help. I remember grabbing every heavy tool along the way, for all the good it did. I’ve never been so unprepared for anything in my whole life.

We were about halfway through our journey when Spencer slipped in something and the darkness could not hide the carnage anymore. There was blood everywhere. It was as if someone had just come in with buckets of blood and tossed it around. Even In all the gore I noticed that there were no bodies. The guys started to panic, wanting to go to their quarters. I tried to talk them out of it. There was no stopping the ones with families, Spencer and Franklin stayed with me. We had all silently gripped different tools and we moved with decidedly more speed. “Boss, this ain’t going to the boiler room,” Franklin chimed.

Around this time the propaganda changed from the caution message to the recruitment video that we all see before leaving on the ship, the one with all the happy workers and families. I knew things were beyond repair then. ““We aren’t heading for the boilers, we’re heading for the engines. We’re getting out of here.” The advantage of being a maintenance engineer is unfettered access. Altering course when we heard the screams ahead of us, it didn’t take long until we had no more alterations to make. Then we heard a clicking noise. I can’t describe it any better than that. The sound is not as important as what we saw. Some sort of creature, grotesque and distorted. It’s arms were long and hinged in the middle while it’s legs were like a man’s but more muscled. It had a small face with beady eyes that just melded into it’s shoulders, no neck at all. My first instinct kicked in and I threw a large wrench at it’s face. The blow landed but the creature didn’t even flinch. Spencer lost it then and started randomly firing his laser saw.