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STORY
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The commander silenced my query about the catwalk. He said that everything would be explained as soon as the remaining tasks were finished. So, what could I do? I waited like everyone else.
While I waited, Seph was nice enough to show me a new HUD command: It displayed a list of all the marines and showed me the status of each person. The teams were as follows:
Team 1: Mr. Samsa, Geoff, Altezo, SodaPop U1, and Seph.
Team 2: Pseudo, Mystery-Matt, Quiver, and Tony.
Team 3: Darkens, Smiling Joe, and Johnson.
This was the first time I remembered to use my portable recorder. I switched it on and recorded their names, down to the letter. I didn’t have to, but it was a way to kill time. Seph didn’t seem to mind it much, though Altezo shot me a couple looks. Altezo was the one pacing the room. I think I pronounced his name wrong.
It didn’t take long for the teams to return. Samsa’s squad phased in while the other two strode through the ground-level door. The hallway beyond looked just like in a medical cruiser: Well-lit, clean, and pleasant. Not what I expected after spending my time in that large, gray control room.
The commander roughly summed up the situation, with Darkens help:
We had two hives secured: Cold Storage and The Youkja System Core. We had captured every resource node on the map, for a grand total of five. Apparently, that wasn’t a very large number. The third hive location didn’t appear on the map at all, which Darkens and the commander searched inch by inch.
When the commander scanned Atmospheric Processing, he found that it was not a hive location. It broke off into five ventilation pathways. Three of them appeared on our maps, but two of them did not. According to the map, there was no way to get to Processing by foot. There appeared to be one maintenance passageway descending from an unknown area. It ran into the center of the Processing chamber, along with every other vent.
One important discovery was that the Processing chamber automatically closed off groups of vents at different times. It seemed there was a completely different area that the Processor had to cover, other than our own, but it could not handle more than one of them at a time. Right now, the two vents and the maintenance passage were closed off, while the passages heading to our base and the secured hives were open.
After listening to all of this, Johnson pestered the commander as to what it meant. He replied by telling us that there was an entirely different part of the ship that our maps didn’t cover. He guessed that the third hive was likely somewhere in it.
The Kharaa were coming to this side of the ship through the ventilation passages. The thing was, those passages were never all open at the same time. Either one side of the ship was accessible, or the other. So, the only way a Kharaa could successfully come to this side would be to enter the processing station, wait, and then pass through when the vent lock changed. This change occurred every given amount of time. The commander wasn’t sure yet how long that space of time was.
He then pointed out the catwalk in our base. It headed to a second door directly above the ground level one. The commander couldn’t open this door, and said it was a dead end anyway. Of course, it wasn’t a dead end. This was the only other way he could find to the other half of the ship.
I made an effort to soak all of this information in, still lingering on my confrontation with the skulk. The thing had seen me, but it didn’t attack me. Not until I had a weapon dropped into my hands, that is. Even then, the skulk vanished when I shot it. I later discovered this was a trait known as "Redemption." There were many cases of Kharaa seeming to vanish right before death, only to arrive again later on. The best theory to date was that some Kharaa evolve some system of teleportation, which kicks in right before the creature’s death. Of course, that isn’t much of a theory in itself.
This meant, of course, that the Beast was still alive. I was not yet aware of this, but we would confront each other more than once before the end. To say the least, none were pleasurable.
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Disclaimer
Monster is © Edan Koch. The Universe in which it takes place is based upon Natural-Selection. All characters and locations are fictional. Any association with actual persons or places is coincidental.
Natural-Selection and all artwork, screenshots, text and code associated with it are © Charles G. Cleveland, 2001.