He knew it. He had smelled that horror on the deck of the LSB and nothing in his experience carried an odor like that. Like rancid leather, salted and stewed in harsh preservatives. It was enough to make your eyes water. He could feel the panic welling in him, overloading him with fright.

It’s time. Enter the codes. Do your job.

He’d seen enough by then to accept the grim truth of what was going on in the tower. Yet, he hesitated. And he wondered if that wasn’t because something inside him, some vestigial race memory perhaps, was reacting to what he was smelling, feeling, and sensing. Knowing it to be the most insidious horror his kind had ever known.

As he walked, Orr could feel cold and slinking things worrying at the edges of his thoughts. He shut them out. He had to. Around him, several luminous figures like huge moths darted about. Appearing. Disappearing. Amorphous, alien shapes, incorporeal, but not truly dead. But it was not just ghosts. Because there were other things now, stinking and slithering, physical evils that could not be denied. He could hear them whispering about in the dark, rustling like high cornstalks in a strong wind.

Wincing, he moved forward at a faster clip, ignoring the phantasms around him. He was shaking badly, oozing sweat that was hot and sour-smelling: the very briny juice of fear itself. A fluttering, semi-luminous figure swept past him and its aura was so cold that it froze the perspiration on his face. Low, buzzing sounds came from somewhere. A high, splintered trilling from somewhere else. He thought he saw a pod of globular red eyes just as moist as wet cherries winking out off to his left. Something whirred over his head and the stench of its passing made him want to scream.

Don’t be afraid. You can’t afford fear.

Yet, his heart was beating so hard it was like that of a terrified kitten.

I’m going to make it, he told himself. I’m not going to be afraid of the terror by night or the pestilence that walks in darkness. Hell no. I’m gonna walk straight and proud like a man because I’m DSU and I’m going to follow my last orders right to the fucking grave. I am the vengeful hand of God that smites its enemies.

He was within twenty feet of the exit when one of those damned things let go with a shrill piping cry. He went stiff as a post and screamed out every drop of terror in his soul. The drill tower began to echo with pipings and trillings, squeaks and chitterings. A constant ree-ree-ree-ree sound like millions of crickets singing out, amplified until it was deafening. Then a mad buzzing rose up as if from hundreds of wings. It was like the noise inside a bee apiary, except a thousand times louder.