'Hey, Father, come 'ere and say hi to my daughters.'�

'I told you not to call me that.'� Dale Langan continued to stare out the control room's large bay window. The view, thousands of white stars sprinkled against a black velvet background, hypnotized him.

A man well into his fifties, Langan possessed a face like a weathered roadmap of winding backcountry roads. Long, deep creases etched into his forehead and wrinkled bags of skin hung beneath his hazel eyes. His rough stubble mirrored a crop of thinning white hair, but, despite his age, Langan was in excellent health. A two mile run everyday kept him ticking, or so he liked to tell his doctors.

'Quit foolin' and get over here, Padre,'� Cooper insisted. 'I know you're new to space travel, but it's not every day that we get a message from home. Take advantage of it.

'Because,'� he continued with a wide grin, 'it's just you and me hurtling through space, mad dog.'�

Langan gave the heavens one final, longing glance, and turned to the control room's interior. It was a jail composed of stainless steel and titanium alloy. Rows of multi-colored buttons, knobs, and computer readouts covered nearly every available surface; large displays and monitors jutted out from the walls with cold efficiency; pneumatic tubes and copper wiring ran between one indecipherable machine to the next.

'Yeah, baby,'� Cooper said to the monitor, and slurped another mouthful of instant coffee. He swished it around in his mouth as he listened to his wife through the headset.

James Cooper sat in the flight command chair, a plush leather seat that contained a dazzling array of its own switches and flashing lights. He reclined in the chair, a flesh and blood man amidst this maze of technology, reunited (for a short time) with his family via a tentative connection that depended on a complex relay system between satellites. At any moment, he knew, one or more of the delicate instruments making this communication possible might fail.

Cooper was a lean, muscular young man, sporting a shock of dark black hair and, because shaving wasn't worth the extra effort, a space traveler's grizzled beard. He wore a plain white tank top that bunched up around his mid-section, and a pair of faded red pants held up by a pair of black suspenders that crossed over in the middle of his back.

Langan rubbed his eyes, trying to adjust them to the light inside the cabin. He trudged across the room, wearing a grimace and taking exaggerated steps over and around various pieces of machinery.

A loud electrical zap echoed through the control room and the spaceship shuddered. Suddenly, the room's only light came from the handful of distant stars through the bay window; darkness enveloped the control room. The monitors flickered and the speakers hurled the rough scratch of static. Langan, mid-stride, stubbed his toe on a jutting piece of machinery and let out a brief profanity.

'It'll be just a second, Father.'� Cooper's baritone voice was smooth, and still tinged with a hint of humor. 'And I'll pretend I didn't hear that.'�

A pneumatic hiss issued from somewhere, the sound of a spaceship trying to catch its breath in the middle of a long voyage. The generators sounded an electrical hum as the monitors powered up, emanating a soft green glow.

'Let there be light,'� Cooper said, and laughed.

Light returned via the control room's overhead fluorescents, then power returned to the other devices.

'What was that?'� Langan asked, his voice no more than a whisper, as if to speak too loud might disrupt the flow of electricity.

'Power spike,'� Cooper returned. 'There's a lot of machinery aboard this gray goose, and the power level's always fluctuating. Sometimes when we're exerting an unusually high amount of energy, the power cuts out while the ship resorts to battery.'�

'Isn't that dangerous?'� Langan narrowed his eyes.

'Actually, it's a good thing, Father. It prevents an overload, and helps the ship regulate our energy better.'�

Cooper tapped the monitor in front of him.

'And it helps me avoid my wife,'� he said, and again that grin played across his handsome features. 'In any case, we're never in any danger. The life support system runs off an entirely different grid.'�

'Oh,'� Langan replied, nodding but not meeting Cooper's eyes.

'Well, look at this monitor. It shows energy levels over the last''�

A loud thump sounded from the rear of the room. Langan turned to look.

The rear wall differed from the rest of the room's surface in its lack of technology. No decoration distracted from its uniform simplicity. The wall's defining characteristic was an oversized door in its center, a door about ten feet across, twice that in height, and composed of the same no-nonsense alloys that made up the rest of the room. To the door's left, at chest level, a small numeric keypad had been mounted on the wall, protecting the cargo hold from intruders.

(THUMP-THUMP!) It sounded again.

'What was that?'�

'It can only be one thing,'� Cooper said.

(THUMP-THUMP!)

'It's awake.'�

'Oh, God,'� Langan cried, and all the color faded from his face.

'No, it's okay,'� Cooper reassured, chuckling at the holy man's expression. 'Don't you think the government's prepared for this? Look at that door.'�

Cooper flicked his right hand towards the back of the room. Langan's gaze followed Cooper's hand to the cargo hold door.

'I don't care what dimension that thing is from, or how strong they say it is. It isn't getting through that door.'�

'Are you sure? Even the pounding alone is enough to drive a man mad.'�

The sounds behind the door continued, and the door trembled.

'Don't you flake out on me, Father,'� Cooper warned, his voice stern and his eyebrows knitting down to meet above his killer's eyes.

All this time, the sounds (THUMP-THUMP!) continued, terrible lashings of limbs against reinforced steel, the rumbling of the door in its frame, and the occasional frustrated cries of a being thousands of years old.
Cooper laughed and shook his head.

'Still an unbeliever, huh?'� Cooper asked, the unlit end of a cigar sticking from his mouth, garbling his speech. 'I guess that's why the Church won't have you anymore. Come with me a moment.'�

Cooper, the young, stocky Navy Seal with a family of two, exited the room. Langan, the lanky, grizzled former priest, followed him. This odd couple marched through the spaceship's main corridor, their soles clanging against the floor's metal panels. Two men hurtling through the far reaches of space with a four thousand year old supernatural monster, and the ultimate fate of humanity, riding with them.

'Why did the Church kick you out, Father?'� Cooper asked, looking at Langan, and although he used the nickname, his eyes were devoid of mirth.

'The Church 'kicked' me out, Sergeant Cooper, because of my belief in operations like this one. The Catholic Church relies on a strong mythology to maintain its following. There's a basic storyline to the Bible, and anyone who wants to belong to the Church needs to belief that storyline. Modern science teaches things like the theory of evolution, and cloning, and all sorts of things that fly in the face of what the Church teaches as immutable truth.'�

'Things that don't fit into their story.'�

'Exactly. And the existence of a supernatural being who is, from all scientific analyses, thousands of years old doesn't fit into their worldview. That'�thing in there is older than they'd tell us the world is.

'Men like us, Cooper, we're heretics.'�

As the two men walked through the corridor, they passed a number of doors on either side of them. Black letters printed at chest level on the doors identified each room's function. They passed the 'Medical Supply Room,'� the 'Sleeping Quarters,'� the 'Mess Hall'�, and half a dozen other doors on their way to the hall's end. All the while,

(THUMP-THUMP!)

they could hear the moaning and thumping echoing from the cargo hold.

'How can the Church deny Slorgutoth's existence? Just two weeks ago, he tunneled up from under Lake Michigan and tore apart Chicago! Hundreds of people died.'�

'I know,'� Father Langan said, and the man showed difficulty meeting Cooper's eyes. 'The Church is a dying organism, and the actions of an organism facing death often fly in the face of all logic. I know what happened back there, and that's why I'm here today. Humanity has got to be rid of that thing. But the Church won't stand with me.'�

'What a screwed up world.'�

They reached the corridor's end, and 'Armory'� in bold black print stood out from the door's silver metal.

Cooper entered a code into the numeric touchpad, and the armory's door slid to the side. The automatic overhead lights flickered on and revealed a room that contained more shiny gadgets than Christmas at a rich kid's house. Guns of all sizes, with flashing lights or scopes or spinning radar dishes, hung in neat rows on the walls. Goggles, masks and helmets filled a table in the corner of the room. Some were of different colors, or sported dials and switches, or trailed pneumatic tubing.

One of these guns stood apart. Titanium composed the rifle's oversized barrel, ten inches in diameter. Beneath the barrel, the long curved teeth of a serrated knife sawed up and down. A laser sight mounted on top pulsed its red light on and off, on and off.

'Don't get your hopes up, Padre. That's not going to be effective against a two ton overgrown squid who's up early from nap time.'�

'What's it for, then?'�

'Just in case.'�

'Just in case of what?'�

(THUMP-THUMP!)

'The reason,'� Cooper said, ignoring Langan's question, 'that we're abandoning this thing into space is because we don't know how to hurt it. It's shown to be resistant to anything we could throw against it. The government is hoping we can drop it off somewhere in the deep regions of space and that it won't find its way back again to Earth, or at least not until we've developed technology to destroy it.'�

Cooper grabbed a long rifle from the rack.

'This is an armor piercing tranquilizer gun. While we can't kill it, we can put the baby back to sleep. In just a few more hours, the ship's trajectory will carry us to the scheduled drop point. Then we can jettison this critter and head on home.'�

A dead quiet overtook the ship. At the same time, both men realized that the beast's protests had stopped.

'Let's get back to the control room,'� Cooper suggested, a worried look transforming his face. 'I don't like leaving it unsupervised.'�

Cooper high-tailed out of the room. Langan started to follow, but stopped mid-stride, his eyes drawn by that magnificent weapon on the wall. He didn't care what Cooper said about its efficiency.

'Just in case,'� he said.

*

Langan returned to find Cooper pacing the control room, muttering under his breath.

'What?'� Langan croaked. 'What is it?'�

'I don't know,'� Cooper said, his words running together and his voice shaking. 'It was in there, before. We both know it was.'�

'It's not in there?'�

'I don't know man, maybe the power irregularity shorted something, maybe it snuck out while we were in the armory, I don't know man. Maybe I'm crazy and it's still in there. But I don't hear it and I don't see it.'�

The door, even after relentless pounding, showed no signs of damage. Father Langan, holding his breath, walked up to the door on his toes. He peered in through the view window, and saw nothing.

'It's not in there, is it?'�

'Nope.'�

'What's that you've got there?'� Cooper asked. 'If that thing got out, your toy's not going to help us.'�

Cooper touched a lit match to his cigar.

'Smoke 'em if you got 'em, Father.'�

'No thanks,'� Langan replied. 'I'm going in.'�

Cooper shrugged and sat back into the control chair.

After punching in the code, Father Langan walked into the cargo hold.

It was a massive room, bigger than it looked from the outside. It had been cleared out to make room for the behemoth, and now Langan's eyes swept the empty room from left to right.

Langan thought he saw a wavering image materializing. He rubbed his forearm across his watering eyes, which were dry and irritated in outer space. The image started as a shimmering light, then solidified into a dark purple mass of swirling tentacles, the length of each outfitted with a dual row of suction cups and terminating in sharp talons. A multitude of searching mouths, open with their tongues tasting the arid atmosphere and saliva overflowing their swollen lips, belched a furious roar into the air, and Father Langan felt the ship's frame quiver. A slick layer of mucus covered the entire creature, running off into a pool on the floor.

With horror, Langan realized that it had been invisible.

Slorgutoth rushed Langan, throwing him aside with a meaty tentacle, and escaped into the control room.

Langan felt like a truck hit him, and his gaunt form twisted and smashed against the ship's wall, where jagged tile corners ripped into his clothes and shredded his skin. Thick strands of blood spattered against the wall, marring the uniform silver tiling with a spray of red.
The rifle flew from his grip and smashed into the wall beside him, sending a shower of sparks into the air and scorching black the metal all around it.

His body folded in on itself and he dropped to the floor with a muffled thump, a crumbled ball of a man. His vision tunneled in, alternately dimming and brightening like faulty lights. In his hazy consciousness, he wondered if perhaps the ship's lights were going haywire once more. He heard a muffled, distant sounding scream.

'Bah...two ton overgrown squid'�,'� Langan breathed. 'maybe it's too much for him'�'�

He spat forth a rough laugh that ended up with more blood trickling from between his lips.

The former priest, a man in his fifties, struggled to remain conscious. His vision continued tunneling in, an overwhelming blackness that limited his sight to a needlepoint of clarity. The black canopy of his sight reminded him of the view from the ship's bay window. He recalled the beautiful view, the grand cosmos that stretched to infinity and the thousands of stars, speckling its surface and defying the blackness.

The old man grabbed on to the wall tiles with cracked fingers, feeling the strength ebbing from his grip, and struggled to his feet, hand over hand, working his way up the wall, each inch a monumental effort of will, until finally he stood on trembling legs, shaking the cobwebs from his head and trying to catch his breath.

As he bent over to grab his rifle, he felt the blood rush to his head, but maintained his shaky awareness. He tottered on his feet, as a baby would, into the control room.

Sergeant Cooper lay on the floor of the control room, his legs bent at impossible angles, his head angled up at the ceiling and his eyes rolled up into his head. The chair, strewn on its side, pinned his body down, but Cooper wouldn't notice; no breath escaped from his body. The tranquilizer gun, the supposed only effective weapon in this spacecraft, lay crushed beside him.

Father Langan swung the rifle up, an act that took all his remaining strength. Slorgutoth screamed again, a high-pitched wail that sent shivers down the Father's spine. It was victorious; nothing remained to prevent the creature's return to Earth.

Father leveled the gun, squeezed the trigger. A powerful ray blasted forth from the barrel, aimed not at the god-beast but at the row of control panels behind it. The ray sizzled upon impact, crackling with power and sending volts of electricity running through the controls, scattering debris throughout the room. The control room's bay window cracked, and a sucking sound filled the chamber. All of the room's furniture sped towards the vacuum.

Slorgutoth rushed Father Langan once more. Its tentacles latched onto Father Langan's limbs, sucking flesh from his bones and wrenching joints out of their sockets. The priest's mouth opened in a scream, but the deep vacuum of space's emptiness muted his voice.

Thick globules of blood, adhering to the peculiar physics of a room with partial gravity, suspended in mid-air. They looked like beautiful droplets of liquid mercury.

The holy man smiled as he accepted his fate. The damage was done; with the inoperable spaceship's momentum hurtling it through space, it would be years before natural rhythms of space brought Slorgutoth back to Earth's orbit.

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