Chương 123: Book Five, Chapter 26: Countdown to launch

Words couldn't convey the feeling coursing through me—excitement, wonder, and abject fear—but they were all there. I knew that horror movies could take place in space, but I still never pictured myself traveling there. I thought that the small town of Carousel would be the limit of our exploration. As I walked up to the giant ship, I almost forgot that I was in a horror movie, and I was thrilled.

But that feeling quickly left me because, in space, small mistakes could become big mistakes, and whatever lay in the stars waiting for us would be deadlier than I could imagine.

"So, what's the story, you think?" Isaac asked nervously. It was on everyone's mind as we were waiting to load onto the ship, which was leaving much sooner than the tour guide Tripp would have seemed to suggest.

"Are we going to fight aliens?" he asked before I could answer.

"In space, they have a home-field advantage."

"Well, to them, we'll be the aliens," Antoine said, "which means we have the home-field advantage in space." Isaac laughed.

"I don't know," I said.

"Aliens are likely, but there are other possibilities, like robots—which got name-dropped. We could be dealing with something like interdimensional demons, but I haven't seen any clues for that yet. Of course, there are always environmental disasters in a closed space like this. Maybe we hit an asteroid field, or we get stranded on a moon. But yeah, aliens seem most likely." No one was comforted, but then I wasn't trying to comfort them. As they stood and waved, I approached Ramona and pulled her aside.

Something had occurred to me.

"This is the worst time to bring this up," I said as we got away from the others.

"I've put off asking you about this, but I just have to."

"Okay," she said.

"So ask."

"We're about to be in outer space in a little metal box. I have to wonder whether or not your friend is coming, too."

"My friend?" she asked.

"The Mercer poltergeist," I said.

"We know about that. We didn't want you to feel excluded, but I just have to know if we're in danger because, if so, you may need to just stay behind." Even if it meant she was written off, we couldn't risk her family's genetic curse appearing on a spaceship.

"Well, I haven't had an attack since I was a little kid, and that was before I remember, so I doubt one is coming now," she said.

"I didn't realize you guys knew so much about that."

"Yeah, I've met him before. Great guy," I said.

"That's not my experience," Ramona said.

"It only starts to act up when you're in contact with other Mercers, or at least normally. Honestly, I haven't had it happen in my entire adult life. I don't think it's going to happen right now. I don't think Carousel would like that." She made a good point. Carousel itself might step in to prevent any unscripted visit from the poltergeist. At the end of the day, Carousel wanted a good film. Strangely, that was comforting to think about. Maybe she would even need tropes to use him.

"Is that why you guys look at me the way you do?" she asked.

"Because you know?"

"No," I said.

"It's the whole being born in Carousel and the strange relationship with Silas Dyrkon that does it."

"Oh," she said.

"Right." I realized she might have been hurt by that.

"I was trying to make a joke," I said.

"We're good with you. You're fine. Now, let's go kill some aliens." She nodded, and we returned to the group. I wondered if I could have handled that any worse. As we walked back, I saw a large transparent cube sitting on a desk in the distance. Inside the cube was a floating hologram of a ship, or at least its blueprints. I noticed that large rubber gloves were attached to the cube so that you could stick your hands through and manipulate something inside. As I approached it, it became clear how it worked.

I put my hands into the rubber gloves and started moving the hologram around in three dimensions. The device seemed both high-tech and low-tech at the same time. I could almost imagine something like this existing in the real world. The thing was, the hologram that I was manipulating was not the ship that stood before us. In fact, I could hardly think of it as being a ship.

It looked more like a giant barge, an interconnected labyrinth of high-tech structures in the 1980s style, like everything else other than the white ship in the building. If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. I read closely: I. B. E. C. S. Integrated Behavioral and Environmental Control System. As I played with it, the others approached.

"It looks like Legos," Isaac said, "or like hamster tubes but with more metal." He was right. The design was modular in that there were lots of different units that looked like they had been connected to each other, and there were many places where additional units could be connected but were not.

"Uh, the IBECS system," one of the NPCs said as she approached. Her name was Flannery.

"Old technology," she said, "but charming. You could attach new modules to suit your needs. I always wished they hadn't scrapped that product line."

"Why did they scrap it?" I asked.

"Oh, who knows," she answered.

"A million reasons, but mostly quality control. They used to make a big deal out of bringing in clients and letting them design their own special ships that would meet their unique specifications. Project managers loved these because they could make their ships without having to consult a scientist or engineer. Of course, there were inefficiencies and an overreliance on automation to keep the ships running. If you're interested, we'll probably get a good look at this one while we're up there."

"The one that left 13 months ago?" Antoine asked. She nodded.

"Our ship's faster. We've just been told that we are to meet up with the captain of the IBECS so you can shake his hand, either virtually or maybe even physically. That should be a fun experience, don't you think?" I did not predict it would be a fun experience, but I smiled and nodded. So we were going up in an advanced spaceship to meet a far less advanced spaceship with noted engineering problems.

Since we were off-screen, Antoine didn't have any problems asking, "Do you think that's where the main characters are?" I was coming to that conclusion as I played with the hologram, trying to memorize things. Location Scout hadn't lied to me. All of the rooms, hallways, and other locations it had told me about were in this story; they were just on a spaceship. I nodded my head. There were a lot of miners on that ship if the number of sleeping bays was any indication.

We needed to be on the lookout for three NPCs who represented the players we would be rescuing. Keeping those NPCs alive was how we accomplished the rescue. Now, we just needed to find them. There were so many things lying about that room and so many NPCs shuffling to and fro. We were in the very early part of the Party Phase, and it felt like there was so much to learn, so we all just spread out and tried to discover things.

Ultimately, the NPCs were too busy, and it looked like we had already reached our limit for what we were going to learn here in Carousel. It was time to take off and fly into outer space, which was also in Carousel somehow. After much more searching and not much finding, other than a few scraps of details here and there, we found the names of some of the officers who would be on the ship we were headed toward—the IBECS. We also found the name of our ship, the Helio.

Then, NPCs, including Flannery and Rudy, ushered us onto the white ship and showed us where we would be sitting during takeoff. The design of the ship was strange; it oddly reminded me of a racquetball court with a walkway wrapped around so that people could look down at the players. It was an odd description, but it felt right. We would sit down in the place where the court would be, and up above, on the walkway, was the bridge.

Was it possible that Location Scout had mentioned "bridge" and that I had not realized what it meant? I didn't remember. It didn't seem like anything on this ship was a shooting location. Other than the main galley, there weren't a lot of other places on this ship. There were a couple of hallways and a few rooms here and there, but not enough to account for all the locations I had seen. The rest must have been on the IBECS.

Whenever we lost gravity, we would be able to float from our seats all the way up into the bridge to see what the pilot and the various crew members were doing—if we wanted to, at least. This assumed they had not yet figured out artificial gravity, which was a staple of space horror. I was so nervous I couldn't stand it. All of the surfaces were white, and the only colors were a sort of desaturated orange and a desaturated blue. Machines beeped, and lights flashed all around the main room.

They didn't fit with the aesthetic of anything I had seen so far, but I was not going to complain. As I sat on the ship, I became certain that this ship was not from this storyline. It didn't fit. It was too advanced. It was from somewhere else—somewhen else. It was just here for us. We all strapped in. Kimberly sat tucked into her seat—which looked like a big white egg—with her eyes closed, clearly not thrilled about what was about to happen.

They did not take their time or walk us through it, which frustrated me to no end. I wished that someone had talked to us and told us what was happening, but they just didn't—because none of it was on-screen.

"Take off in 5... 4... 3... 2…" Beneath us, thrusters started to come to life, and our strange egg-shaped chairs seemed to adjust to the vibrations.

"Lift off." We were in the air, rising quickly. Around us were portholes with bubble-shaped windows so that we could see outside. The biggest of those were the ones above us, which were so large that they took up much of the front of the ship. I don't think I breathed once the entire time we were rising. I heard the others screaming, but I didn't really register it. The turbulence increased, and the chair tried to counteract it, but I still felt it.

The G-forces pressed down on me as I sunk back into my seat, and it felt like my skin was being pulled down over my face. Then, just as I couldn't take it anymore, it all stopped.

"Congratulations," a voice sounded over the intercom.

"You have officially made it to space." The feeling of weightlessness overcame me for a moment, but only for a moment. As I predicted, the artificial gravity kicked in. But strangely, it was dragging us toward the blank white wall in front of us instead of toward the back of the ship. I felt like I was about to fall forward—except I didn't because my egg-shaped seat, as well as all of the other objects in the room, started to move forward along lighted paths in the ground.

We moved forward until we reached the wall, which had a curved corner instead of a sharp 90-degree turn. Then, our chairs just kind of moved along the wall until the wall became the floor beneath us, and the artificial gravity suddenly made sense. Everything in this room had done that, including the bridge, which now stood before the large portholes that were at the front of the ship so that the pilot could now see out—and so could we. We could see the stars. We were in space.

My sense of wonder was on overdrive, but the longer we moved along, the more my sense of dread kicked in. Kimberly might have passed out in her seat; I couldn't tell because she just sat there with her eyes closed. Isaac looked dizzy, and Cassie was crying. Antoine was still excited and was hooting and hollering. I wanted to throw up or pee my pants. Maybe both. They say space is dangerous. They say that it's unforgiving. They say that everything in space is trying to kill you. But hey, we were used to that.