Kraken Orbital

by James J. Stubbs

  Chapter 10

  Mountaineering

  Kolt leads the way through a few winding rock crevasses. The light grows stronger with each ninety degree turn and before I even have time to think about the dangers ahead, we are upon them. The cave opens up onto the sheer face that we have to climb.

  There is no gentle progression, giving us any time to psych ourselves up for the mission, we are just thrown out into it and will have to make do. I have no idea how to climb. Climbing a tenuous vine nearly killed me. Climbing down a rocky chimney plunged me into a deep river that nearly drowned us both. How the Hell am I going to beat this?

  While gripping the side wall of the last section of the cave as hard as I can, I lower my head out of the opening to see just how far we have climbed. The wind has picked up a lot in the early morning sun and I can’t see anything through the snow flurry it has whipped up.

  The wind drags snow away from the mountain side and thrashes it around like a plaything. It takes my breath away as soon as my face leaves the relative comfort of the damp and dark cave system.

  ‘Kolt?’ I ask him, a pathetic tone hung about my voice, almost like a desperate plea.

  ‘We have no choice.’ He preempts my words and pushes past me to climb out into the battering wind.

  He disappears to the left. My heart starts to beat like crazy again. I am faced with no option. I have no choice but to follow Kolt and he knows that. He knows if he walks or climbs away from me I’ll follow like a beaten child. I hate that. He has me figured for the scared little mess I am, no fooling him with the pointless display of fake bravado.

  A thought passes my mind, the same one that has slapped me across the face a few times since crashing, I really am the beta male in this relationship.

  Kolt has almost disappeared into the blanket of snow. It takes me that long to work up the courage to follow him. I really don’t want to. I feel the power shy away from my fingers and muscles as the adrenaline pumping through my veins causes me to slump away from the challenge.

  My instant reaction, out of a choice of to either fight or take flight, is to run. But I can’t. I remember reading something about an ancient conflict from back on Earth. It was from a time known as the Second World War, a long past memory that has ebbed all but completely from the collective vicarious memory of the world. All men feel fear. Fear is normal. Anyone who claims to have none is either psychotic or lying. True courage is not the absence of fear. But the ability to overcome it.

  I paraphrase it in my head as I search for the motivation to do this. As I search for a reason to persuade my inner coward to let go and climb out onto the rocky face with Kolt. That will have to do.

  I reach around a jagged and freezing rocky slab with my gloved hand, looking for traction and finding only little of it, and use it to pull my body out of the relative warmth and comfort of the cave. The wind hits me right away and I feel nothing but its harsh pounding weight exert its force on my back and push me head first into the snowy rock surface. I panic at first but my focus seems to come back as soon as I take the initial plunge into the unknown.

  Just like it did as we hurtled over that waterfall so many miles below. The wind will give me traction against the rock face and help me to hold on so long as it doesn’t change direction. I press my already cold body hard against the sharp edges of the frozen snowflakes and carry on. If I swing out the wind could get underneath me and pull me clean off the wall. The angle is already against me. I can just about see Kolt’s dark figure, washed with a blanket of snow, patiently and dutifully waiting for me in the not too far distance ahead. He is shouting to me, I can hear that, but I can make out none of the words.

  ‘What?’ I scream at the top of my lungs, but for my effort I just get a blast of icy snow particles shoot down my throat. I am virtually drowned by the force of the wind and decide to ignore him and just try to get closer on my own initiative.

  I slide my cold hands further along the precarious layer of frozen water, trust all of my weight to a small and rapidly disappearing rocky ledge, and balance with every bit of strength and focus I can manage. I shift my weight and use what crevices in the ice wall I can find to help me traverse across the snow covered face of the mountain.

  I can feel my toes bend backwards as I fight to keep my clumsy boots on that tiny rock ledge.

  ‘Kick your toes into the snow!’ I can just about make out his words through the howling and ever present wind. I peer to him through the volumetric snow. But my balance is so precarious that I dare not move even an inch to try and catch another syllable. I can see his black silhouette though.

  He is kicking at the wall with his pointed toes to create temporary foot holds in the ice sheet. I click on immediately after his demonstration. I realize that I’m trying to face the direction in which I am travelling and I should really just be looking right at the wall. Kicking my boots into the ice will create good footholds and I just have to transfer my weight from one foot to the other and so on.

  I can keep my balance better with my hips thrust parallel to the wall rather than stepping over myself like I am now. My heart rests and my breathing relaxes, along with my tired arms and legs, as I take on his advice. I slam my right foot hard into the ice and watch as chunks of white snow fly away from the wall to create a good stepping place.

  Kolt must be happy that I’ve figured out his technique because he is back on course again without as much as a glance back. My legs are trembling with the effort after no time at all but I need to stay focused. Maybe Kolt was right. Maybe I still did desire rescue. I could really do with it now to be honest. I dare to look down and immediately wish that I hadn’t.

  The ground is far from view, the snow drifts still batter the mountain side, and I can see nothing past the swirling mass of white flakes. I feel like falling. My legs are screaming at me to let go, screaming so hard that part of me wants to let them, and all that stops me is the feeling of falling into the abyss below. I start to scream as loud and as throaty as I can to muster my energy and power.

  There is something primal about doing that. Something in it that focuses the mind and releases pent up, ancient and long forgotten parts of our ape minds, and allows us to reset ourselves to absolute zero. It works and my legs are good for another few steps.

  The pace is relentless and I try to hone in on my tactic of screaming and attacking the mountain side with each heavy swing of my leg. Kolt must think I’m possessed. Let him. He is beyond crazy anyway. I am so consumed with my battle against the mountain that I don’t even notice him stop. I scare myself so hard when I run into him that I almost lose my grip and fall.

  My scream stops immediately and I am sure my embarrassment shows. If all of my blood had not been taken up in the battle to re-oxygenate my poor tired muscles, I know I would blush. He looks at me with dissatisfied and intense eyes. Like a father might look at his son when he did something immature. Something he thought he would be past.

  ‘There is a sheltered outcropping below us.’ Even through the howling animal like wind I can detect the uncertainty in his voice. Even past his horrifying eyes I can see his faded memory battling its way to the surface and failing to quite reach it.

  ‘Is that the way you came?’ I scream through another mouthful of cold snow. It makes me splutter and shake my head. This must be the first time that I have ever envied Kolt for the garish gas mask he has been cursed to wear.

  ‘Yes.’ He replies after a pause that doesn’t exactly allay my fears.

  ‘Are you sure?’ I chose my words very carefully right there. I have no wish to offend him or send him spinning even further down the rabbit hole of his lost mind. I just want to know how certain he is of it.

  I can see what he’s planning. By the way he keeps glancing from side to side and back again. The way he keeps checking his hand holds. Ones he has punched into the wall of snow himself.

  ‘There is a chasm between this face of rock and the sheltered section. I have to jump.�
�� I look for him. There is no way to see if there is a solid ground below or just a vast expanse of nothing. If he jumps and is wrong we will both just tumble down the side of the mountain to our certain death.

  And that’s how I know the Morris-Cooper Mining Company didn’t kill off my last glimmer of hope. Because I do require rescue. Because I desire it. Because I want a better life and there is still some shining light of a though glimmering inside of me that believes I will one day see it happen. But I shake my head at him in protest anyway. I don’t want my new friend to die either. Even if he does make me look like a chimp at every turn.

  ‘We can just find another way mate.’ I summon my most comforting tone and out it to full use. I even reach out an open palm to pat him gently and somewhat affectionately on the shoulder. ‘You don’t need to jump if you think…’

  Too late. He let go. Kolt, irritating even in the face of death, springs elegantly from the safety of the slanted wall, turns one hundred and eighty degrees in the air and spreads his arms like a bird taking flight to control his direction. In seconds he is gone and I start to genuinely hyperventilate.

  ‘Kolt!’ I scream to no reply. ‘Kolt!’ I hang on the name and drag it out in my hoarse voice for as long as I can. Still no reply. My heart sinks what feels like the full length of my body and I can feel my entire central nervous system go completely numb.

  I know what I have to do. I know I trust him. But there is something else too. I want to jump. I can feel it. It is fear, I know what fear feels like having experienced it in all its known forms, but there is desire mixed in there too. Excitement, joy and purpose. I can feel, no, I can hear a powerful voice urging me on. “Jump” it says in my head “go on, jump” and it repeats again and again.

  The thoughts and voices steady me, fills me with elation so powerful that it blankets my every thought of fear, and I can’t help but smile as my grip takes its own control of the situation and lets go.

  Before I have any chance to change my mind my body slips and tumbles away to the ground. The wind whips past my long hair and rumbles in my ears as I fall. I am instantly filled again with focus as I adjust my eyes the best I can to the darkness that follows. I can feel the cold wind and flakes of snow blasting past my tumbling body but before I know it, my legs impact the edge of a gradual slope that carries me gently into a dark recess in the mountain side. Kolt is waiting there for me. Poised and emotionless as usual.

  ‘I did not think you would let go.’ He speaks first as I jump to my feet like a kid at an amusement park. I fight the urge to shout out that I want to do it all again even though it wouldn’t be a lie. I shake my head, not from disapproval at what he said, but at the fact I can’t order my thoughts well enough to express them.

  ‘I can’t describe…’ I take my first shot at it but come up with nothing. ‘Why did I want to do it?’ Kolt, though I cannot see his jaw nor make out his facial expression, smiles. I can tell because the wrinkles around his baggy red eyes intensify above what would be his cheek line.

  ‘It is in all of us.’ He begins as I try to shake off the head pounding rush of adrenaline. I place my hands on my hips and stagger around the echoing space. ‘We all desire and welcome a fall. It might be a remnant of our ape descendants. But I do not think so. I believe it be an element of self destructiveness we all have.

  A small part of us all desires pain, be it physical or emotional. We desire it to define us. We need it to define us in an age where we have no definition. No great purpose for us to fight for, nothing to blind us from our own mortality.’ I have all but stopped listening to Kolt as he hammers out his macabre feelings on the matter. My head has mostly settled and I have taken to assessing our new location.

  The crevasse is deep and I am in some ways amazed we made the fall at all. The slope that carried us safely to the rocky bed is too steep to climb back up so we are utterly committed at this point. The recess forms a sort of long corridor that stretches out in front of us. The snow lightly flakes down the column, what little of it manages to escape the billowing and relentless wind, and lies at our feet.

  The loss of the wind has definitely taken a chill factor away but it is still deathly cold. Kolt can’t have come this way. He wouldn’t have been able to climb the sheer vertical and ominous slabs to our either side. I could ask him but I doubt it will end in an explanation that isn’t marred with his patchwork memory.

  I guess he must have discovered this recess while exploring and mapped it somewhere in his fractured mind. My assumption is better than bothering to ask. I’m more interested in why he isn’t fazed at all by the death defying leap. I’ll ask him later.

  ‘I wish we had kept some of that snake.’ I remember that was the last thing I had eaten. My stomach, since my focus and adrenaline is waning, is starting to rumble very loudly. I clutch it with an open palm like it will help but it surely doesn’t.

  ‘Let’s continue.’ Kolt raises a hand, his leather bound and soaking wet apron creaking with the move, and points down the shaft into the darkness ahead.

  I can smell burning. That putrid, but somehow homely and pleasant, smoky smell. I don’t know where it is coming from and I can’t see any visible sign of smoke or fire but it is a tantalizing smell indeed. It seems to be hung in the air though. It seems distant but at the same time not far away.

  It feels somehow less than real. It feels feint but still ingrained and ever present. This might sound odd, but it feels like how it is to remember smoke. Not a smoke that is present, flaring and offensively weaving its way up your nostrils, but a feint whiff that conjures up the thought and with it the memory of smoke.

  I must be imagining things and decide it best to just shake it off. Kolt has already walked on and I need to catch up with him.

  A few paces down the damp corridor and there he is. He seems distant. More so than usual. For the sake of our new found relationship I decide to challenge him and ask what the matter is.

  ‘Everything ok?’ My voice echoes up the long columns of exposed rock.

  ‘No.’ I can’t help but to recoil at his honesty. He turns and I can see him crying inside of his gas mask. His tears wash slowly around his red stained eyes as he tried in vain to blink them away. I am filled once again with fear and more as I place my hand on his shoulder.

  I feel deeply sorry for him but I don’t know why. I feel scared for him, and agreeably for myself as well, and I simply don’t know what to say to him. An orange light is emanating from inside of his mask. A light that looks like the beginning of a fire. Shivers run down my back and arms as I realize what they are. As I see flames start to lick at him from under his garish apron.

  He raises an agonized fist and juts it forward to where the rocky corridor opens up into a plane of bright daylight and fresh snow. I see his ship for the first time and my emotions immediately mix together.

  I am filled with child like excitement at the prospect of seeing a Kraken Class and fulfilling that juvenile dream, and then with a sudden realization of a forgotten truth. Something I knew. Something I had figured out long ago and deliberately hidden from my conscious thoughts.

  His ship was cracked and broken, shred to bits and mostly buried in the volumes of snow, but the fires had long ago gone out. The Russian Federation flag along its cresting side was long out of date and the paint was cracked and peeling away from its titanic body.

  The metal was dated, rusted, and was returning slowly to the ground. I said, through fear shaken decibels:

  ‘I thought you had just crashed?’ I had to ask him. What choice did I have? I needed him to validate what I already sensed was true. I needed him to say it. I needed him to remember it for himself and then bring me in on his big secret. I looked back to see him utterly enveloped in flames but doing nothing about it. As if reliving his last horrific moment.

  ‘I remember now. I know why I do not desire rescue. I know why I am lost and not afraid.’ He was starting to shout and stood tall, threateningly poised and aggressive
ly motioning forward with tiny baby like steps towards me.

  I started backing away in frozen terror as I watched him burn in thick red and black flames. I stumbled on an icy shelf and fell flat to the floor. A sharp icy blade penetrated the back of my skull and white sparks flew over my eyes as I started to pass out from immediate blood loss.

  ‘Because I am already dead!’ He shouts as my eyes fade into black with every elongated blink. He embraces the fire as it culminated in a second phase of intensity. He screamed, louder and deeper than before.

  ‘I am dead and so are my comrades. Their spirits and lost souls wander and pollute this land.’ I can’t visualize his anger as my eyes finally close. So very angry. At himself? At me? At finally reaching death’s door, so he can no longer pretend he is still alive and fester in wait, wandering like a ghost? I finally give in to blood loss and pass out. Scared and alone.

  ‘I am dead and have been for years. I have been pretending, assuming life when I have none to assume. I was afraid to die and let go. I am not afraid anymore! Come for me Death!’