by G J Ogden
Page’s voice came over the commlink again, distorted and distant-sounding. “Sal, we’re about to lose contact, are you still there?”
Maria took a deep breath and then opened the commlink for the final time. “Karl, I’m sorry that this is as far as I could go with you, but I know you will make it the rest of the way, and I know you’ll make it right. Take care… Maria Salus, out.”
The commlink crackled and returned static. Maria checked the status panel and saw that the signal link to the UEC moon base had been severed; she reached across and turned the commlink off and then sat back in her command chair. She had been terrified at this stage of atmospheric entry on the previous two occasions, but this time she felt calm and oddly at ease. The orange glow outside filtered away and Maria again saw the azure sky of the planet above the blanket of piercing white clouds. But it didn’t last for long; she was chasing the terminator and would soon pass into darkness.
Alarms rang out in the cockpit again, bringing Maria’s senses into sharp focus, not without a little help from the stims that were making her heart race and mind fizz. Checking the damage control console, she saw that the core had ruptured and was venting coolant, and the main engines were on the verge of total failure. She acted quickly, reducing power to the main engines and lowering the reactor output to the minimum required to keep her in the sky for as long as necessary. Then she grabbed the control yoke and took manual control, aiming for the probe deployment point indicated by the heads-up display holo. The ship responded sluggishly to her inputs, jerking and shimmying as she moved the yoke.
“Come on, just hold together for a few more minutes!” Maria shouted at the ship as she wrestled with the controls.
The deployment point was just ahead and Maria managed to tear a hand away from the control yoke for long enough to decompress the rear compartment, which contained the probe array. The rear hatch blew outward and Maria again had to fight with the controls as air rushed inside, buffeting the ship even more violently.
5000 meters to the drop point…
Another alarm rang out, though it barely registered above the roar of the wind flooding the cabin. Maria again flicked her eyes across to the damage control console and quickly scanned the new warnings, but the list of alerts made for deeply uncomfortable reading.
Fuel Containment: Failing, 25%
Core Containment: Failing, 20%
Life Support: Failed
Aft Thruster 3: Failed
Communications: Failed
And the list went on.
2500 meters to the drop point.
She could see flames trailing from the port wing – an electrical fire resulting from one of the numerous failing systems – and she was losing altitude too. She increased power to the thrusters and felt the ship kick upwards, but then another explosion jolted the ship and the familiar whine of the alarm sounded once more.
Maria cursed. “Okay, okay, I get it!”
500 meters to the drop point.
She prized a hand off the control yoke and grabbed the manual release for the probe array, which had been crudely installed in a hurry by the engineers on the moon base. She took a deep breath of the thin air inside the cockpit and counted down the release.
“Three… two… one… drop!”
Maria yanked the crude lever upwards and then tilted the nose of the shuttle above the horizon; the probes began to slide out in clusters, exactly as planned, forming into groups and then shooting off over the horizon, like streaks of sunlight poking through a curtain into a darkened room. The shuttle continued to lose altitude and with the nose titled upwards, it was rapidly losing velocity too. She glanced back; perhaps just over half of the probes had been deployed.
“Come on!” Maria shouted at the ship. “Work faster!”
A louder and more elemental alarm sounded, like the shriek of some sort of wild and terrible beast, but in stark contrast to the urgency of the alarm, the corresponding message seemed almost comically civilized.
Containment failure imminent. Eject core immediately.
Below the message was a pulsating red button, containing a single word.
Affirm
Ninety percent of the probes had now been deployed. “Close enough…”
Maria reached over to the damage control panel and hit the pulsating red button, feeling an immediate kick from behind and beneath her chair as the core was shot out into the sky like a bullet, and then every system went dead. Seconds later the core detonated creating a brilliant blue star in the night sky, which was born and died in the blink of an eye. The shock wave hit moments later, rocking the ship as violently as during atmospheric entry, but with the power core gone the alarms had been silenced and all Maria could hear was the roar of the wind and the thump of her pulse in her ears.
Glancing behind at the cube-shaped honeycomb of metal bars, Maria confirmed that all the probes had been released, and she sat back in the chair and smiled, feeling a near overwhelming sense of satisfaction wash over her. If the probes worked as planned, it would mean the end of the Maddening, and it would also mean the planetsiders, and the few hundred survivors – all that remained of GPS – would live on.
The shuttle stalled, jerking Maria back into action and robbing her of her elated sensation. She angled the nose back down, picking up forward velocity. Without the reactor, the ancient UEC shuttle was barely more than a falling lump of metal, and the only thing that Maria could rely on was the aerodynamics of un-powered flight, a subject that had been covered academically during her training, but not one she had ever expected to apply in practice.
The terrain below was rocky and mountainous and not ideal for landing a soaring hunk of metal, but then out of the port-side window she spotted a long, black lake, shimmering under the silver moonlit sky, and she banked the shuttle towards it. Maria’s heart rate climbed further, almost as rapidly as the ship lost altitude, but incredibly the controls responded and the battered and broken shuttle carved an arc through the sky, lining up with the watery runway.
Altitude 1000 meters.
Maria yanked down hard on her straps, making them as tight as possible, and braced herself. The electrical fire on the port wing had spread, and now the entire port side was ablaze, trailing a fiery tail behind her, like a soaring phoenix.
300 meters.
The murky water filled her entire view outside and Maria pulled back hard on the yoke, trying to slow her descent, but the edge of the lake loomed ahead and Maria knew then that she had overshot. There was nothing more she could do, other than press her eyes tightly together, roll the dice, and see where they fell.
The shuttle hit the water like a skimming stone, bouncing back up and then hammering down again, but instead of water it was grinding across gravel and stone, until finally the shuttle collided with a towering cluster of rocks, stopping it dead, like a fly hitting a spider’s web. The broken and burnt metal creaked, groaned and hissed and then came to rest, silent and still, on the shore of the black lake. Inside, Maria Salus was slumped forward in the chair, blood trickling from her head and falling silently to the metal decking, like crimson tears.
Chapter 34
The explosion and resulting shockwave from the shuttle’s ejected power core brought Yuna racing out onto the veranda and to Ethan’s side.
“What was that?” she asked, with a mixture of nervousness and excitement as the rumble of the explosion echoed softly in the distance.
Ethan shook his head. “I don’t know. There was a bright blue flash and then I heard the explosion. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
He was peering at the area of sky where the explosion had occurred, searching for the other, smaller white trails of light that had preceded the flash, but they had all disappeared.
“What are you looking for?”
“Before the explosion, I saw… lights,” said Ethan, unsure of exactly how to describe what he’d witnessed.
“Lights, like the ones you told us about? Like from the h
ermit’s folk stories?”
Ethan shook his head again. “No, they were different somehow, like they were flying, not falling.”
Yuna frowned and followed Ethan’s gaze up into the sky, trying to spot these mysterious lights, and then she noticed something, like the glint of sunlight reflected in a window, bright and sharp and moving quickly across the horizon.
“Was it like that?” said Yuna, pointing to the orange shimmer in the sky.
Ethan saw it. “No, not exactly, but what is that, it seems to be coming this way?”
“Another fragment of the space station, perhaps?” suggested Yuna, but then she discounted her own idea. “No, it’s moving horizontally, like it’s flying towards us.”
The realization struck Ethan like a knife to the gut.
“It’s a ship!” he said, feeling the dread sensation in his gut spill out to the rest of his body. The glowing object grew larger and closer, and caught the moonlight. It was definitely a ship, and it was on fire and falling fast.
“It looks like the shuttle Page and Ashley arrived in, but it has no power!” Yuna cried, gripping the metal railing in front of her as if to stop herself from falling. “It’s going to crash!”
A feeling of helplessness gripped Ethan; there was literally nothing he could do but watch as the shuttle soared lower, trailed by orange flame and black smoke, and impacted on the surface of the water, kicking up a cloud of white spray that contrasted starkly against the black water and doused the flames in an instant. The shuttle bounced back into the air for a brief moment before crashing down hard and skimming across the gravel shoreline until it collided with the rocks with a brutal crunch, a few hundred meters from the lab-oratory.
Ethan turned to Yuna and grabbed her shoulders. “Yuna, go back inside and make sure Gaia and Summer are safe!”
Yuna’s startled eyes met Ethan’s and then narrowed. “Why, what are you going to do?”, but before Ethan could answer, Yuna had already read his expression and seen the determination in his eyes. “Ethan, there could still be more of the maddened out there! The serum we pumped through the lab’s air-conditioning system would have only been vented a short distance outside.”
“They could still be alive, Yuna,” Ethan said urgently. “It could be Page and Ashley, or even Maria. I have to help them. Protect the others, I’ll be back as quickly as I can.”
Yuna tried to protest again, but Ethan had already run to the fence bordering the veranda and vaulted it, jumping down onto the rocks on the opposite side, and sliding and scrambling to the stony shoreline below. He pulled the pistol from his belt and ran for the crashed ship, feeling the stab of the sharp stones underfoot dig into the soles of his travel-worn boots with each frantic stride, but as he closed on the wreck of the shuttle, he saw it was already not alone. Two shadowy figures appeared on the rocks above the crippled hulk, and started to slowly slide down onto the rocky shore. Ethan ran harder, pumping his arms and legs and sucking in the cold night air, which burned his lungs as if it were liquid fire. The figures turned to face him, and illuminated by the bright moonlight he recognized their gray, mottled skin, elongated faces, sinewy hair and black eyes.
Ethan tried to stop, but slipped on the loose stones and stumbled over, dropping the pistol, which clattered across the stony shoreline. He scrambled to his feet and searched for the weapon, but before he could reach it the closest of the two creatures ran at him. Ethan grabbed a rock and prepared to fight, but then to his surprise the creature also stumbled on the loose stones and fell, landing awkwardly and letting out a low, dull groan, before climbing slowly back to its feet. Ethan scrambled over to the pistol and raised it at the creature, pulling the trigger. But there was nothing. He tried again and again, but the weapon did not fire.
The safety! He realized, and tried to think back to what the hermit had shown him, twisting the pistol around in his hands looking for the switch. The creature was still loping towards him, but its gait was abnormal, even for one of the maddened, and it moved at half the speed Ethan expected. He backed away from it, still twisting the pistol in his hand, until he spotted the lever towards the rear of the weapon and clicked it with his thumb, revealing a small red dot. Raising the pistol again he shot the approaching figure in the chest at almost point-blank range; the crack of the weapon rang out in the still night, startling Ethan almost as much as the sudden appearance of the creature. It reeled back as black-red blood oozed from the wound, but instead of continuing its attack, oblivious to the injury as Ethan had witnessed other maddened creatures do, it merely stood and watched the liquid seep from its body. Then with one final, dark glower into Ethan’s eyes, it fell to its knees and collapsed onto its back, staring blankly up at the open sky.
There was no time to understand this unusual behavior, because the scrape of bony fingers against metal drew his attention back to the ship. The second figure was climbing onto the ship, using the torn and twisted metal panels as footholds and handholds. Ethan fired at it but missed, hearing the bullets ricochet of the metal and then off the rocks behind the ship, sounding like a hammer striking stone.
The creature reached the upper hull and pulled itself up, but then appeared to waver and almost fall, before awkwardly loping out of view towards the cockpit. Ethan sprinted to the base of the ship and scrambled up the rocks to gain enough height to get another clear shot. His muscles burned and his fingers bled as they clawed at the jagged rocks, but still he could not see his enemy. There was a gap of a few meters between the rocks and the shuttle, and ordinarily he would have considered the leap too risky, but rational thought escaped him. He threw himself towards the charred hull, but the distance was too great and he slipped back, losing the pistol as he grasped frantically for a handhold, until his tunic caught on a jagged strip of metal and halted his fall back to the rocky beach below. His right foot found a purchase and he pushed himself back up, grunting with exertion as he rose higher, hand over hand, until he was finally at the top.
Breathless and in no shape to fight, he staggered on towards the cockpit and found the creature, motionless, staring down through the smashed glass. It looked confused and distant for a moment and then it slumped to its knees. Ethan rounded on it and drew back a fist, ready to strike, but the creature merely twisted its neck and stared up at him, confused, its mouth agape. Ethan swallowed hard as he stared back into the creature’s eyes, and saw that instead of the pure, obsidian black that he had seen so many times before, these eyes were fractured with hairline cracks, like strands of white thread. Its chest rose and fell erratically and then, as suddenly as it had dropped to its knees it fell back and slid off the dimpled metal of the shuttle’s hull and thudded onto the rocks below like a discarded puppet. Ethan stared at it for a several seconds longer, to make sure it was dead, but the crumpled body was as still as the black water of the lake.
He rushed to the cockpit and found Maria strapped into the pilot’s chair. Her eyes were closed and her head and body were slumped to one side.
“Maria!” he shouted, lowering himself in through the smashed cockpit and dropping to her side. He took her head in his hands and gently lifted it, feeling Maria’s pulse push back against his aching fingers, and then let his head drop into her lap; the sudden relief of knowing she was alive acting like a pressure valve that drained away all the strength that remained in his beleaguered body.
“This seems familiar,” croaked Maria. Her voice was weak and broken, but she still managed to smile at him.
Ethan slumped back and looked at her. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, and instead found himself doing both at the same time.
“If you mean crashing to the planet’s surface and then me finding you, then yes, this does seem remarkably familiar.”
“Not crashed… landed…” Maria corrected. “You’re as bad as my old partner.”
The PVSM on Maria’s left wrist bleeped angrily, and she gingerly lifted her arm and flipped open the panel. She was silent for a moment as she read the screen
, and then smiled weakly, closed the panel and lowered her arm.
The initial, almost giddy relief at Maria being alive had gone and was replaced by the icy grip of fear.
“Are you okay? Are you hurt?”
Maria reached out and grabbed Ethan’s hand. “Don’t worry. Just help me out of this damn chair.”
Ethan released the straps and took Maria’s weight on his shoulders, helping her to stand. In the glow of the moonlight, she looked pale and her skin seemed to glisten.
“I need to get you to the laboratory building, just by the shore,” Ethan said, gently supporting her as they climbed out of the cockpit. “Gaia is there; she can help you.”
They clambered out and then both lay back against the hull to rest and regain their strength. Maria’s PVSM bleeped again, but this time she did not check it and simply reached down and switched off the alert. Ethan looked at the device, and then at Maria, and the disquieting feeling that had begun when the alarm first sounded grew more intense.
“Maria, you’re starting to scare me. Those things don’t bleep for no reason.”
“No…” said Maria, exhaling the word slowly into the night air. “No, they don’t.” Then she smiled softly at Ethan and held his hand. “I’m afraid that Gaia isn’t going to be able to work her magic on me this time.”
Ethan felt his stomach twist. “But she created the serum! Karl brought it back to the base for you!”
“I didn’t take it.”
“What?!” Ethan let go of Maria’s hand and rocked away from her. “What do you mean you didn’t take it? What are you doing back here?”
Maria grabbed Ethan’s hand again and when she spoke, her words were soft and comforting, but had a chilling finality to them. “Ethan, please listen to me. I don’t have much time. I just need you to be with me, okay?”
