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Nurgle has had his turn in the limelight, but there are two other Chaos Gods active in the 21st Millennium. Time for another God to step forwards...

PART ONE

“Shut up, Merrick,” Daystrom growled. “Bloody idiot.” He rapped the power conduit again with his spanner. Merrick South stopped himself from wishing the lumbering, overpaid idiot would electrocute himself. You didn’t wish for anything while travelling through the hyper-realm. Wishes had a habit of coming true here.

“Xander,” Daystrom said, addressing the ship’s intelligence. “Status report on this power conduit.”

“It’s fine,” Xander responded. “No break in the flow.”

“See?” Daystrom complained to Merrick. “It sounds fine. It looks fine. The AI says it’s fine. The Emperor on Earth probably reckons it’s fine. Can you tell me what this means?”

“It’s fine, sir?”

“Got it in one, Ensign. You’ll make Captain in no time.”

“So why does deck five keep going dark?” Merrick asked before Daystrom could start walking back to Engineering.

“I don’t give a stuff about deck five. The ward’s got backup power and nobody goes in the morgue. Well, no-one who’s gonna complain about the dark.”

Something clanged distantly, echoing along the corridor the two men were standing in. Merrick looked nervously around. The corridor was functional, a pale grey submariner’s dream. Pipes, conduits and bulky control units jutted from the walls. Occasionally, the ship would groan as it caught a new warp current. Sometimes it sounded like the hull might buckle beyond breaking point, allowing a flood of aetheric energy to sweep the crew into oblivion.

“Look at you,” said Daystrom. “Three days in the hyper-realm and you’re ready to mess yourself. Why did you even join the Navy?”

For the stimulating company, Merrick thought.

“Come on, let’s get back,” Daystrom said. “There are actual problems we should be dealing with.”

The two engineers couldn’t be more different. Chief Daystrom was squat, overweight, with grey stubble on his scalp and chin. He was a bulldog in a grey Navy uniform. Merrick was tall, gaunt and perpetually nervous. Daystrom might be his superior, but Merrick’s intelligence was far livelier and he had more ambition. Merrick would exceed Daystrom one day and both men knew it. Daystrom chose to handle this by being a moron towards his younger charge.

“What will we tell Doc Silver?” Merrick said.

“Tell her to bend over and let the sun shine out of her arse. We’ll be out of the hyper-realm soon. See if things go back to normal in realspace.”

Merrick pinched the bridge of his nose. He had a sharp headache.

“The Gellar shield?” Daystrom asked in a rare moment of sympathy.

“Sometimes I think it’s worse than the warp.”

“Yeah,” Daystrom said. They turned left; this corridor led directly to the Engineering department. “”But without it, we’d be worse than dead.”

“I suppose, sir. At least it’s better than what we used to have.”

He was referring to the old quantum field. That technology had worked, but good luck enduring its effects for more than a day. Space travel had surged in efficiency once the Gellar shield appeared. Now a ship could manage four to five days at a time in the hyper-realm.

Merrick’s thoughts started following their usual morbid line. No-one knew exactly what happened to people trapped on a ship whose Gellar shield had failed but he had personally overheard a distress call from the XMS North Star. This was the fledgling Terran Navy’s first horror story. The screams of its crew hadn’t lasted long and Merrick knew he would never, ever hear anything more terrible.

They passed empty junctions and closed, blast-proof doors. The ship’s crew must have been engaged in duties or trying to rest in their quarters – they didn’t pass another soul. The two men passed the time with idle chatter, gradually becoming aware something was wrong. They stopped at a four way junction.

“Where the bloody hell are we?” Daystrom said. His confusion was so pronounced, Merrick almost found it funny. He looked around. There were no signs, no markings, to tell them where they were. Not exactly unusual on a military ship – you didn’t need to give invading aliens a road map to critical systems – but the sheer blandness, the repetition, was a bit odd.

“I don’t recognise this junction,” Merrick said. “I think we should have turned left back at the –“

“Shut up, Merrick. We were in the corridor. We should have actually gone past Engineering by now. Xander, which junction is this?”

“I am,” the ship replied.

“Eh?” said Daystrom.

“Xander, please identify our present location.”

“Starship Alexander Chase, registration XMS 229991, Terran Navy, commissioned –“

“Have you got problems?” growled Daystrom. “Answer the bloody question.”

“You are at the crossroads,” Xander said. It ignored their further questions.

“Fantastic,” said Daystrom. “Our bot’s lost the plot. Have you got your vox unit?”

“I left it in Engineering.”

“Oh, even better!”

“You said we’d only be five minutes!”

“There’s a long way between that and ‘Don’t bring a vox unit’, lad!”

“I wasn’t expecting to get lost on my own ship!”

“What do they teach you in basic?” Daystrom snapped. “What do they teach you ever since you’re a kid? Don’t take any chances in the hyper-realm! It’s like being on a date. Go prepared in case you get fu-”

The ship groaned and juddered. It sounded like twisting metal. Was that even possible? The ship was made out of maximantium with a power field running through it. Alneran beam weapons struggled to penetrate Navy power armour. It wasn’t as if anyone else was in the hyper-realm with them: who would be stupid enough to start a fight in the warp?

“That didn’t sound right,” Daystrom said, with great understatement. It had sounded more like a voice than anything else, now that Merrick thought about it. It had an organic quality, like a cry or a howl.

“What in God’s good name was it?” Merrick said, one hand clutching at his throat.

Daystrom looked back the way they’d come. The sound hadn’t echoed. It was difficult to tell where it had come from. It was the first time Merrick had ever seen the Chief look scared.
“Come on, lad,” said Daystrom. “The kettle’s waiting for us back in Engineering.”

They made to start walking again but stopped immediately. Which way were they supposed to go?

PART 2

“Are you lost, too?” a woman’s voice said, making them both jump so bad Merrick thought Daystrom would have a heart attack. They turned to see ensign Amanda Cole standing behind them. She blinked in surprise at their reaction, then grinned.

“Relax, gents, it’s only me. Who were you expecting, a daemon from hell?” She said those last few words like an actor delivering lines in a children’s play.

“I wish it had been,” Merrick said with a laugh of relief. He held up a hand and Cole high-fived him.

“Where did you come from?” Daystrom snapped at her. “Bloody sneaking up on us like that.”

“I’m not a ninja, sir,” she smiled, unfazed by Daystrom’s attitude or his breath.

“You got a vox?” said the Chief.

“No, sir. I can’t get Xander to answer me either. Where are we? I’ve been wandering around for the last five minutes and I haven’t seen a thing I recognise.”

“Maybe Captain Singh built an extension and didn’t tell his Chief Engineer,” said Daystrom. “Come on. It’s this way.”

Merrick had his doubts but he and Cole followed the Chief. The corridor wove through the ship, making plenty of right-angled turns to avoid giving intruders any decent firing lanes. The Alexander Chase wasn’t a big ship by Terran Navy standards and its layout wasn’t terribly complex. They should have encountered someone else by now, or seen an area they recognised.

“Well this is bloody stupid,” Daystrom barked. “We’ve been on this ship for two years. How have we never seen this bit before?”

Merrick had been mapping the ship in his brain. The Canyon-class was an iconic Terran Navy design, in widespread use across Solar Segment. The oldest surviving vessel was nearly nine years old; only the toughest designs lasted that long in this craphole of a galaxy. Anyone with any interest in starship design would know the schematics of the Canyon. Fair enough, many details were not published and the material that did make it into the public realm was full of deliberate inaccuracies. Solar Command didn’t send critical details into the aether, not when alien empires were starting to take note of humanity’s emergence.

Many starships would be modified by their crews throughout their service. Every ship was modular by design so it was easy to do. Such modifications were actively encouraged. The Martian Science Council greedily absorbed every such detail, ever seeking to build the perfect starship.

But Merrick knew Xander, not just its internal layout but the AI’s personality. He’d spend many nights in his quarter, drunk on whiskey, chatting about matters technological and theological with Xander and he’d come to think of the AI as a living being. Xander was lively, intelligent, eloquent. Merrick knew something was wrong with this ship and its brain. He just didn’t know what.

“We need to come out of the hyper-realm,” he said.

“Brilliant,” said Daystrom, who was starting to get out of breath with all the walking. “I’ll just cup my hands and yell that to the Captain.”

Cole laughed and slapped Daystrom on the shoulder. He glowered at her, silently ordering her to maintain discipline.

“I’m serious,” Merrick said. “You do realise we’ve walked so far we should have passed through the hull and gone out into the hyper-realm?”

The Chief stopped walking abruptly. Cole bumped into him.

“It’s something to do with the hyper-realm,” said Daystrom. “Some effect we don’t know about. Some kind of space dementia. Hyper-dementia.”

“Maybe it’s the Gellar shield,” Merrick suggested. He didn’t point out that he’d already suggested the hyper-realm was responsible.

“You want to switch it off?” Daystrom said. “See which one of us is right?”

Gellar shields were now mandatory for vessels accessing the hyper-realm. And yet, their effects upon human physiology, and even human consciousness, could be acute. Headaches were the most common response. Many people reported a sense of enhanced clarity, like everything was too real, too sharp-edged. Virtually everyone felt some relief when ships dropped back into realspace and the Gellar shield was deactivated. Worse, there appeared to be no way to engineer all of these side effects out. Warp theory was monstrously complicated. Only Dr Gellar himself was thought to fully understand how this technology worked, and he was back on Earth, working on the Fearless programme.

That strange and awful noise came again: a metallic scream, sounding impossibly like a voice.

Not a voice. A roar.

“What the fong was that?” Cole said, white-faced.

“Whatever it is,” said Merrick, clutching his throat again, “It’s a lot closer than before.”

“It’s still behind us,” Daystrom said, hefting his spanner like a power maul. “Let’s keep going.”

“No, no,” said Cole, “that came from ahead of us.”

“Are you deaf, Ensign?” Daystrom said, rounding on her.

“What do you think, Merrick?” Cole asked steadily. Merrick realised he was the only member of the crew everyone called by his first name.

“I think it’s not up to me,” he said. He glanced at Daystrom, then back to Cole. “I just announced we should be swimming through the warp right now. My judgement’s off.”

“It doesn’t matter what Merrick thinks,” Daystrom said. “It came from behind us, so we go forward. Let’s move, Ensigns.”

Merrick’s brain hurt whenever he tried to place that dreadful sound. That wasn’t a side effect of the Gellar field. His mind danced from subject to subject, considering and discarding one idea after another. It couldn’t be a hull breach. They would certainly have known about it. A breach in a maximantium hull was a momentous thing by necessity. Every alarm on the ship would have sounded and everyone would have run for the saviour pods – but who would be mad enough, or desperate enough, to launch saviour pods into the warp?

“Where is everyone?” Merrick said. “There are over four hundred people on board. Why’s there no sound? Are they all sitting with their hands over their mouths?”

“Their thumbs up their arses, more like,” rumbled Daystrom.

“It’s a big ship,” said Cole.

“Yeah,” said Merrick, “but it’s not that big. We should have seen or heard someone by now.”

“You’ve seen me,” Cole said with a bright smile.

“Yeah,” Merrick breathed. He knew Cole; she worked in the natural sciences, but although he’d had a thing about her for a while – seeing her in the ship’s disco wearing a short dress and dancing suggestively tended to make him think differently about her – he’d never spoken to her, never done anything but nod and smile politely when she’d seen him. He was more confident with machines than people and he knew Cole was smart. Merrick liked to be the smart one in a group.

“This is ridiculous,” Daystrom said. He sounded ready to snap. They halted outside a room they’d never seen before. The bulkhead was mottled as though from exposure to water. There was no vox-button beside the door, so he rapped on the door, looking embarrassed. “Hello in there?” he said loudly.

Merrick and Cole looked along the corridor in either direction. Nothing moved.

Daystrom opened the door and paused, mid-step.

“What the blessed Buddha?” he gasped. Daystrom never had problems cursing in terms of someone else’s religion. Why offend one deity when you could do the pantheon?
Merrick and Cole crowded behind him, peering into the room.

Slender black chains hung from the ceiling gantry. Hook-ends gleamed as they swung gently in circles. Water rained down from split pipes, filling a rectangular depression in the floor. The pool looked and smelled like toilet water, which was bizarre, since the waste extraction system didn’t use water and didn’t create an odour. The walls and floor were soaking wet.

They backed out of the room and Daystrom closed the door.

“All right,” he said after a few moments, “did you two see that?”

“Would it change anything if we said ‘no’?” Cole said, subdued.

“Maybe it’s an old refrigeration room,” suggested Merrick. “The water is old coolant and the hooks were for meat. It might explain the smell.”

“If you’re being served meat that smells like that,” said Daystrom, “the chef probably doesn’t like you very much.”

The metallic screech came again. It was definitely getting closer. Either bulkheads were progressively giving way, or something was following them. The sound didn’t seem to come from any direction in particular. It just existed as a noise.

“I think the Gellar shield is failing,” Merrick said. “It’s the only thing that explains all this.”

“If that’s true,” Cole said, “it won’t make a difference where we go.”

I really enjoy your 20k plotlines. I find the lack of established background has helped you make better stories.

Thank you! I agree, I think the freedom of 20K has helped a lot. 40K is a bit "pulp violence" for me. I am more interested in characters with motivations and 40K can be a bit on the nose, a bit "shallow", in this respect.

Reading Creepypasta, and recovering strongly from a dark tough time in my personal life, have given me the confidence and motivation to start hitting big. Maybe I'll make it, maybe not, but I'll keep delivering 20K fiction until I can't write any more or the internet compels me to stop!

-------------

PART 3

They tried several other doors, reluctantly at first, gradually becoming desperate to make contact with other humans. None of the doors would open. The three crew members began to run, shouting, crying out, afraid at first they would bring the shrieking, metallic thing closer to them, then realising it already knew where they were as it called out again.

Merrick stopped them as they reached another four-way junction. Daystrom leaned forwards, hands on his thighs, breathing like a wounded bull grox. Cole breathed lightly, barely out of breath.

"Why are we stopping?" she asked Merrick.

"We've..." He was so out of breath he had to pause. "We've been here before."

"How... huh... how can that be?" Daystrom gasped, trying to look up at his subordinate. "We never doubled back."

Merrick reached down and picked up a small coin.

"I put this down. I was going to leave a trail behind us, so we could find our way back, but I got distracted."

"You owe me five credits!" thundered Daystrom. "I thought you said you hadn't got any money?"

"For God's sake, sir," Cole snapped. Her hair hung in a pony tail, too long for Navy regulations, but Captain Singh allowed his crew a lot of leeway. "Is this the time?"

"Watch your mouth, Ensign," Daystrom said, straightening up.

"Er... guys..." Merrick said, looking back the way they'd come. Cole looked first and gasped. Daystrom was slower, as he'd been staring at Cole with fire in his eyes. Daystrom stiffened in shock.

"What the fong?" said the Chief.

Something was happening to the corridor ceiling about ten metres back, near a junction. It looked like a blue ring of fire was drawing itself in the air. The flames were moving backwards, as though being sucked into the ring. It hurt to look at the ring, with the same intensity as a sick migraine.

When it was complete, the ring began to widen. It happened at a gentle pace, as though whatever was happening had all the time in the world to do it.

Frost began to spread along the walls, ceiling and floor towards the shocked crew. Their breath misted in the air. It was suddenly void-cold. They shivered and drew instinctively nearer to one another.

PART 4

They heard laughter. They distinctly heard a voice laughing. It came from within the ring. The angle was bad, but if Merrick squinted to avoid the light burning his retinas, he could see the edges of a swirling blue tunnel beyond the ring.

Whoever was in the tunnel was laughing, but there wasn't real humour in it. It was hard to describe: it was like they were laughing for the first time, and they didn't understand what laughter was or why they were doing it.

"Get ready to leg it," Daystrom said.

"We'll just end up back here," Cole said, clutching Merrick's arm.

"By the balls of Daystrom's mother," Merrick breathed. "What the hell is that?"

Something fell out of the ring and splattered across the deck. It was a violent manoeuvre, as though someone has fired a burst of coloured water from a cannon.

The puddle began to draw itself back together. Something was rising from the centre of the puddle... some vile, terrible thing that should not be. It looked like a warped fungus that was sprouting arms, and the arms kept collapsing back into the creature's central mass. It was like the thing couldn't decide what form to take, or didn't know how to hold the forms it was trying out.

It was blue, the same colour as the ring of fire which now circled it like a halo. The corridor was nine feet tall. That thing's head nearly reached it.

Of a sudden, blue flames began to jet from the creature's body until it was consumed by them. The flames radiated such intense cold that the three humans were forced to retreat another ten feet, and they could still feel it even from there.

"Zeeeeeeeshhhh," a voice thrummed, coming from within their minds, yet somehow also coming from within the horrid thing. "Zeeeeeeenshhhh..."

"Get me out of here!" Daystrom bellowed. The retreat was like a nightmare. All Merrick could hear was the thundering of his heart and the dreadful voice rumbling in his soul.

"Zeeeeeeenchhhh..."

PART 5

Merrick and Cole were well in the lead of the ailing Daystrom when they ran smack bang into a woman who shot into their corridor from a door that opened in the starboard wall. She practically clotheslined them. All three went down in a ridiculous, swearing, struggling heap.

Daystrom vaulted over them like an Olympic gymnast.

"Get up, you thick droks!" he yelled over his shoulder.

Merrick drew back a fist to punch his assailant, but she qualied before him, hiding behind her arms.

"Don't! I'm Navy! I'm Navy!" she cried.

"Bains?" Cole said in surprise.

Merrick clambered to his feet and dragged Cole with him.

"Come on," he said. "That bloody blue thing's coming. If we -"

He dared to look back. The corridor was empty. This was one of the longer ones which ran for forty meters. There was no sign of pursuit, no sounds. No laughter.

"What blue thing?" Bains asked. Her eyes were wide. Short black dreadlocks framed an attractive but very frightened face. "What's going on?"

"We're being attacked by aliens from the hyper-realm," Cole explained before Merrick could say anything.

"Oh, God," said Bains. "Why haven't the alarms sounded? Where are the armsmen? How come we haven't dropped back into realspace?"

"Those are all drokking excellent questions," Merrick said. "We can discuss them over tea and scones. Come on!"

He started running after Daystrom. The Chief had disappeared around the far corner.

"Chief!" he yelled. "Daystrom! Wait!"

Cole had been filling Bains in. Both women caught up to Merrick, who had stopped and was looking at the decking above him, then around him.

"What are you looking for?" said Cole. "Come on!"

"Why aren't there any crawlways?" Merrick said. He didn't have to rack his brain to visualise the locations of maintenance crawlways, since they were set flush against the corridor walls throughout the ship. They would be locked down during alien attack and posionous gases could be flushed through them should any hostiles get into them, but as Bains said, there hadn't been any alarms. The ship was quiet, as if oblivious that it was under attack.

Or, he realised with a sick jolt, there were no other crew members left.

Maybe they were dead, maybe they'd been taken. Maybe they were lost in their own personal hells, as Merrick was increasingly coming to believe was happening to him.

If that was true, what hope was there for any of them?

PART 6

They took a right at the next junction and found crawlways in the walls.

"Ask, and you shall receive," Cole quipped as Bains helped Merrick pull one of the access doors open.

"I wish we had a drokking plasma cutter," Merrick said as they struggled with the heavy door. "We could have used it to weld the damn thing shut behind us." He stuck his head into the crawlway, looked around, and pulled back, all in the space of a couple of seconds. "We're clear. I'll go first."

They heard that frightful, mechanical scream again.

"Jesus, that was right around the corner," Cole said. She rushed forwards and pushed Merrick's struggling hindquarters into the hole. "Get your fat arse in there, Merrick!"

"What about Daystrom?" asked Bains.

"Sod Daystrom," said Cole. "Come on, Sandeep, get in the hole." She all but shoved her crewmate in, following quickly. It was awkward for her to pull the access hatch closed since she'd gone in face first but she managed it, although she wasn't overjoyed that it would hold when that screeching thing reached them.

All three were sealed into the quiet world of the crawlway. It was tight and dark. Cables clustered in each corner. Computer terminals and cogitator banks provided weak light, casting a patchwork of blue and amber radiance.

"There's no power coming through these cables," Merrick called back. His voice was muffled. The walls seemed to steal sound and keep it prisoner. "They should be humming."

"At least we're not gonna bloody fry ourselves," Cole said. She wanted to move faster. The two people in front were holding her up. All she could see was Bains's arse splashed with gold and blue from the wall terminals. If things were different, she'd have rather looked at Merrick's backside, but today she had no time for such thoughts.

"I'm lost," Merrick announced after two increasingly painful minutes of crawling.

"So what else is new?" said Cole.

"Don't you recognise anything?" asked Bains. "Can't you interface with any of these cogitators?"

"I could, if I'd brought my kit."

"Drok's sake," Cole said. "I thought you were an engineer!"

"Yeah, sent on a five-minute job to check a dodgy power link! I didn't think I'd be stuck in here with you two and a blue mushroom flambe."

"You said that earlier," Cole said. "It wasn't blue. It was pink."

"I thought it was pink," added Bains.

Merrick didn't reply. He didn't care if they were colourblind. He was trying to think.

"Look for exit hatches leading into rooms or corridors. I haven't seen any so far, but they should be every few dozen metres."

They crawled round for another few minutes.

"Are we going in circles?" Merrick said.

"You tell us," Cole said. "You're in front!"

"We should have seen an exit hatch. These crawlspaces aren't this big. If they were, anyone who got in one would have the run of the ship."

"Maybe it's the hyper-realm," said Bains. "Maybe we're not seeing what's really around us. We could be two feet from the hatch we came in from."

"She's right," said Cole. "It's messing with us."

Merrick tried to calculate how long this whole mess had lasted. There was no way to know how long they'd been exposed to aetheric energy, or how much had leaked through the Gellar shield. They could all be strapped to separate beds in the medibay, screaming and thrashing as they imagined themselves to be lost in some impossible labyrinth.

Something about that thought really bothered him. He didn't believe it. That wasn't the problem. He'd heard of the impossible labyrinth before. Where? How was it relevant?

"I'm getting claustrophobic," Bains said.

"A spacer, claustrophobic?" Cole said.

"I feel like we're trapped," said Bains. "I can't describe it."

Merrick's mind was racing. A detached part of it knew exactly what Bains was saying. He felt like he was being consumed... like he was crawling down a gullet, into the body of some beast. Something crept into his consciousness. He imagined he could hear breathing. Long, laboured, slow breaths, moving up and down the corridor, as he and his crewmates fed themselves to an entity that had taken over the ship.

PART 8

They weren't digested. They found an exit hatch within a minute of believing themselves to be trapped.

Merrick pushed it open and half-fell into the corridor.

"What the fong...?" he breathed.

Bains and Cole pushed into him.

"Why have we stopped?" Cole shouted from the back.

The hatch opened out into a broad corridor seemingly hacked from crystal. Far broader than any space aboard a Canyon-class cruiser. Even the ground level - you couldn't call it decking - was six feet beneath the hatch.

"Oh, Jesus," Merrick breathed. "What the drok is this?"

Bains wedged up alongside him.

"Oh, God," she said.

"What's going on?" said Cole.

Merrick pushed Bains back, then awkwardly levered himself out of the hatch. The tunnel he found himself in seemed to have been created by the brush-strokes of an oil painter who liked the colour blue. Funny - a few moments ago the walls and floor had seemed jagged, chiselled, with crystal bunches sprouting randomly.

He helped Bains out, then Cole, although Cole preferred to help herself.

"Well," Cole said rubbing her hands together, "we're in the crap this time."

"How can you be so calm?" Bains whispered. "We're all going to die."

"This must be what happens when the Gellar shield collapses," Merrick said. He remembered the crew of the North Star, screaming and begging. Whatever had happened to them was far more violent, far less protracted, than what was happening here.

I guess we're the lucky ones, he thought. We've still got a chance.

PART 9

"The first question is, where the hell are we?" said Cole.

"Up diarreah creak," said Bains.

"The next question," said Merrick, "is where do we go from here?"

"We need to go back in the hatch," Bains said. "Head back the way we came."

"I'm not going back in the hole," Cole said. "I felt like a rat crawling into the belly of a snake."

The tunnel seemed to disappear into darkness a few dozen meters in either direction. The walls seemed to sparkle as though they'd captured starlight. That was another feature Merrick hadn't noted at first. Now he couldn't seem to focus on anything else.

Bains gasped, a full and deep vocalisation of horror and fear. She grabbed Merrick.

"What's -" he started to say, and turned to look behind him.

"Jesus!" he said, grabbing hold of Cole. The three crew, pride of the Terran Navy, stared with a fear so deep it was almost awe.

A human figure stood about thirty meters down the tunnel with his back to them. He was stocky, overweight. He wore a grey Navy uniform.

"Daystrom," Merrick whispered. "What's he doing there?"

Daystrom clutched something in one hand. A spanner. The heavy end of the spanner seemed to be dripping something. Merrick squinted. It looked like blood. And meat.

"There's something wrong with his head," Bains hissed.

Daystrom's formerly egg-shaped head seemed flattened somehow. The Chief Engineer turned, slowly. His crewmates gripped each other, knuckles whitening.

They all cried out when they saw the mess Daystrom's face had become. His head... it had been smashed in. There would have been madness in his eyes...

"They won't let me die," he said. His voice was weak. Pleading. "I couldn't solve it. I live here now."

...if he still had eyes.

The Chief Engineer had bashed his own brains in. Ripped his own eyes out. Blood drooled from his mouth. He could still talk after he'd bitten his tongue off.

"I'm so sorry," Merrick said. He stumbled and fell to one knee as the women fled, shrieking, into the darkness behind them.

"We'll be brothers soon," Daystrom said. Blood slobbered from his mouth as he started laughing.

Merrick turned and followed his colleagues into the darkness, knowing there was nothing he could do for Daystrom. The Chief was lost to them.

Another great story. You have a real gift.