“It’s just you and me now, Darsh. I have Pacifier 6. We can tame them, all of them. I hope you’re ready for a new world.”
A Word from Geoffrey Wakeling
Horror has always been a fascinating genre to me; a genre that I both love to read and watch. I remember vividly attempting to find a film that truly scared me when I was university. I sat through countless hours of spine-tingling terrors, slasher-esc blood fests and psychological thrillers. My love for all things science fiction naturally led me to one of the best horror films ever created – Alien. Zombie flicks, though not necessarily scary, became a firm favourite, and I could quite happily sit for many an hour enjoying this niche.
“Hybrid” is a very different story than first imagined. Having written Pacifier 6 a couple of years ago, I was keen to follow up on this novella in some respect…not necessarily with the same characters, but with the same premise of a world where zombies were being viewed as a potential labour force.
In an original concept, Freya was a young teen, stranded by a zombie apocalypse and fighting alongside her uncle to find a cure. As you’ve now read, things took a darker route for her; it’s somewhat strange to see this innocent girl become something I’d never planned. Though, it does compel me rather to see what she gets up to next!
If you’d like to learn more about the Pacifier world, please feel free to visit geoffwakeling.com to read the first chapters of my novels, check out my book blogs, sign-up for my newsletter, and more. In addition, you can follow me on Twitter (@GWakelingWriter) or join me on Facebook.
www.geoffreywakeling.com
Free Fall
by Peter Cawdron
CHAPTER 1 - HOME
STARS PEPPER THE INKY BLACK DARKNESS. Little more than an inch of reinforced clear plexiglass surrounded by insulated sheet metal separates Jackson from the cold, empty vacuum of space.
“Hi Honey, I’m home,” he says, his fingers resting on a computer screen, touching lightly at a pale blue dot in the electronic distance.
Physically, Earth is still too distant to be resolved by the human eye. Besides, with both the engines and the shielding on the Phaethon facing in the direction of travel, there are no windows facing Earth. This is the closest Jackson will get to seeing Earth until the Phaethon passes the Moon.
Phaethon, Faith on, Fave on, Rave on—on any given day Jackson can pronounce the name of his spacecraft half a dozen different ways depending on how tired he is and how lazy his tongue feels. He isn’t supposed to talk to himself. Mission psychologists say it isn’t healthy, but fuck ’em. They aren’t the ones strapping themselves to a spacecraft powered by a daisy chain of thermonuclear explosions. They aren’t the ones risking their lives to test the viability of interstellar travel.
Fame? Is that really his motivation? His wife said he was selfish during the divorce, but she was hardly an impartial observer. She said he never cared about anyone and never could. Part of him hates to think she might be right. No, curiosity, exploration—this is what drives him on. Of course he cares about others. He’s human, not a machine.
“Houston. This is Phaethon. Do you copy?”
That there is no reply isn’t too alarming. At the speed the Phaethon has been traveling over the past two months, the shields have produced a ridiculous amount of radiation as everything from fine specks of dust down to individual atoms adrift in interplanetary space collided with her.
Named after the mythical son of Helios, the mighty sun and giver of light, Phaethon has propelled itself up to 97% of the speed of light relative to Earth. Between the glowing outer shield and the electromagnetic pulses produced by the engine, communication with Earth isn’t possible until the Phaethon’s speed drops back below 10%.
Jackson should be right on the cusp of reestablishing comms, but there is no reply.
“Houston. You should have seen her. She was beautiful. She did everything that was asked of her. Not more than a 2% deviation from the flight path. Outbound arc north was nominal, as was the southern return.
“We had a little tremor at the halfway point while orienting for the decel burn. For a while there, I was a little worried the engines wouldn’t align with the shields and I’d sail off into space like Major Tom, but the old girl didn’t let me down.
“Oh, and hey, onboard tracking detected another fourteen trans-Neptunian dwarf planets. Yes, you heard that right, fourteen of the suckers, and that’s just what we could observe on the fringe of the Oort Cloud. The largest is slightly smaller than Pluto, but what a beauty. In the UV, she shines like an opal.”
Jackson runs his hands over his face, cleaning out the grit in his eyes as he says, “For the record, I don’t recommend 1.4G constant acceleration. It’s OK at first, but after vacillating between that and zero over dozens of alignment burns, I feel like shit. I cannot wait to get back to a constant one gee.”
His mind wanders. If someone could see him—if there was some cosmic eye watching him, what a sight they would behold. Rather than floating around like the Apollo astronauts or those in the Shuttle or onboard the Orion, Jackson is stuck to the wall. For him, the leading face of the spacecraft feels like a floor, but that is the illusion of deceleration.
“I want pizza and beer,” he says, wondering if Houston can hear him, hoping someone down there is taking notes. “Seriously, pizza and beer. Nothing fancy. Just a pepperoni pizza and some cheap, nasty beer. Hell, it could be warm for all I care. And football. I have got to sit my ass on a couch and mindlessly watch men charging at each other like mountain goats. Hey, who’s looking good for the Super Bowl next year?”
Silence is the only reply, but Jackson doesn’t care.
“Okay, Houston. I’m entering a sleep phase. Wake me on approach, will yah? Goddamn decel is screwing with my vision. Eyeballs must be deformed by pressure or something. Hell, I can concentrate and push through it, but I’d rather not bring on another migraine. I’m going to get some sleep. You get that pizza and beer ready, you hear?”
Jackson rests his headset on the command console and dims the lights in the cramped confines of the Phaethon.
“Two months here, almost four months back there,” he mumbles to himself as he climbs into his sleeping bag and curls up on the pseudo floor of the craft. “That relativity shit does my head in.” He laughs, adding, “Better goddamn pay me for four!”
He is asleep within seconds; his worn, tired body shuts down his mind.
An eerie blue light shines in through the windows of the Phaethon.
Jackson squints, wondering how long he slept. He’s surprised by the light. For him, it seems as though just a few seconds have passed, not the almost ten hours displayed on the inflight clock. After months of darkness, the brilliance outside is baffling. He tries to get up only to find there is no up. He is floating weightless in free fall. There is nothing to push off of to get up as he’s drifting almost a foot from the floor.
Spasms electrify his body. In that split second, it is as though he’s in a dream, falling from a cliff. His body shakes, wanting to wake him before he hits the rocks, only in space there’s no escape from free fall. Instead of waking to find the comfort of his bed holding him firm, he wakes violently to the nightmare of falling forever down a rabbit hole. It takes a couple of seconds for his mind to reorient itself and embrace the weightless experience without fear.
Wriggling with the floppy sleeping bag, Jackson works his legs out of the bag, summersaulting slowly around the cabin of the Phaethon.
Home.
“Good morning, Houston,” he says, picking up his wireless headpiece and slipping it over his ear. “Looks like a beautiful day down there.”
There’s no reply, but Jackson doesn’t care. He’s excited to see the emerald greens and azure blues of the Bahamas drifting so calm and serene beneath his window. Fluffy white clouds pepper the sky hundreds of miles below him.
“I know you get this all the time from us astro-nuts, and I know it’s kinda cruel pointing it out, but damn, you ha
ven’t seen Earth until you’ve seen her from orbit!”
The sleeping bag drifts lazily beside him. He bundles it up, scrunching it into a ball and stuffing it into a cupboard, loving the way that action slowly pushes him away from the wall. Free fall is a lot like swimming, only without any resistance from the water.
Jackson is expecting mission control to begin talking to him about reentry. As exciting as it is to be home, he’s going to miss space. Like most astronauts, Jackson spent his first few days feeling seasick. NASA likes to call it space sick, but for Jackson, motion sickness in free fall felt all too similar to a deep sea fishing expedition he once did off the Florida Keys. He could have died on that boat and he wouldn’t have cared as long as he could stop vomiting and dry-heaving. Once he acclimatized to space though, free fall was like living on a roller coaster.
He loves it.
“Free fall,” he says, distracting himself and feeling as giddy as a child at the sight of Earth rushing by so close below. “It’s like playing in the ball pit at McDonalds. You know you’ll never get us kiddies to leave of our own accord. It’s just too much fun.”
Still there’s no reply.
The Phaethon has automatically brought Jackson into a slightly elliptical orbit roughly five hundred miles above the Earth’s surface. Although his formal title is pilot, Jackson understands the reality of the mission. He’s a guinea pig. He’s along for the ride. NASA humors him with a handful of tasks and objectives along the way, but for the most part he’s an observer. He’s trained in how to repair critical systems, but the term ‘repair’ is a misnomer. Swapping parts is something a robot could do. Jackson’s on board so the brains at NASA can evaluate how well his body copes traveling at almost the speed of light, but he doesn’t care. It’s his name in the history books, not theirs.
Dozens of contingency plans have been preprogrammed into the Phaethon, covering every possible emergency. Flying the Phaethon is like choosing menu items at a restaurant. All the hard work has been done by someone else. Jackson follows his training and starts bringing up the various options for reentry on his computer terminal. There’s no internet connection, but that’s not surprising as it tends to be flaky at the best of times.
“Houston?”
The silence is unnerving, but Jackson shrugs it off.
“What’s the plan? Do we have confirmation of a recovery ship in the Pacific drop zone? What’s the weather like down there? I’m picturing clear skies over Waikiki... Please don’t tell me I need to come down in the Atlantic.”
He pauses. This time, rather than waiting a few seconds to avoid talking over the top of mission control, Jackson waits a full minute.
“Houston?”
Nothing.
“Ah, mission control?”
Instinctively, he looks out the window, watching as Texas drifts by beneath him. Towns and cities are visible as little more than grey smudges on an otherwise sandy colored desert. Pockets of forest dot the landscape. Farms are scattered like patchwork quilts, with multicolored squares breaking up the harsh, barren landscape.
“Houston, why am I in a retrograde orbit?”
He laughs, adding, “What? You guys didn’t think I had enough to deal with up here? You decided I should play dodgeball with space junk?”
The silence is eerie and unnerving.
“Okay, Houston. Assuming it’s not April 1st I’m activating a dead comms protocol. Switching to auxiliary systems. Outbound transmission looks good. Inbound looks fine, but if you’re transmitting, I’m not reading you.”
Jackson busies himself, checking technical manuals, not noticing as the Continental U.S. slides silently beneath him and his tiny craft.
Dark clouds hide the West Coast as the Phaethon races across the vast, lonely Pacific. Night falls abruptly somewhere over the ocean. With each orbit taking ninety minutes, he knows he’ll be back over Texas well before the sun sets on the Lone Star state, having passed through a night and a day in a surreal hour and a half.
“I hope you can hear this,” Jackson says, unscrewing a panel on the bulkhead as he drifts helplessly within the Phaethon. “I know you can hear this. I know you’re doing everything you can to reestablish comms, but I’ve got to tell you, this is freaking me out a little. So close but so far, you know.”
He’s chatty. After two months, he might have become somewhat introverted, but Jackson finds solace in talking, even if he’s talking to an empty ship and a silent radio.
“Professionalism, right? Keep your cool. Solutions present themselves to a calm mind. The anxious miss the obvious. Well, all that advice seems a little patronizing when you’ve got an entire planet set firmly beneath your feet. When you find yourself hurtling around Earth faster than Superman and his proverbial speeding bullet, reality is a little different. Little things can freak you out.”
Screws float carelessly beside Jackson as he pulls a panel away beneath the main flight controls. With a flashlight between his teeth and a computer tablet in one hand, he begins checking fuses. Although he’s floating upside down relative to the seat on the command deck he feels as though he’s climbed up inside a simulator. Memories of his training come flooding back.
“Okay,” he says, letting the flashlight drift from his lips now he’s had a good look at the wiring. “Dead comms, let’s do this by the book. Fuses—check. Main bus switch—check. Auxiliary bypass—check. Redundant back up—check. Circuit board—check. There’s no sign of any discoloration, no burnt smell, nothing. But, hell, who knows what’s going on inside those circuits. They could have been slowly roasting over the past few months and I’d never know it.”
Frustrated, he slips the cover back on and screws the panel in place.
“I’m going to check the radio in the reentry pod.”
As he drifts past the window, Jackson gets a glimpse of the dark Earth below. A typhoon is forming out at sea, with brilliant white clouds spiraling in toward a tight, tiny center. In the distance, the coast of Asia is visible in the moonlight.
“Huh,” he says to himself, wondering why there are no lights. Although Jackson isn’t sure which part of Asia he’s flying toward, he’s aware Asia is the most densely populated landmass on Earth. But with electrical infrastructure from the last century, blackouts are probably common during the storm season.
Jackson moves hand over hand through the Phaethon, making his way to the reentry pod.
It takes a few minutes to power up the pod. Backlit controls glow in green and red.
“Houston, I’m broadcasting on the emergency band, using the reentry pod. Do you read me? Over.”
Silence.
By now, he figures he must be somewhere over the Middle East. There should be relay stations or satellites automatically routing his signal around Earth and into the control room in Houston.
“For good measure, I’m activating the emergency beacon. Just trying to make some noise up here and get some attention. Banging pots and pans, as it were. Don’t freak out on me now. I’m doing a good enough job of that myself.”
He turns up the radio.
Static hisses in the air.
“Great,” he says sarcastically. “I can pick up the remnants of the Big Bang some 13.8 billion years ago, but I can’t get a message from five hundred miles away.”
Jackson fiddles with the settings on the radio, setting the tuner to search through the kilohertz and the megahertz bands used by commercial radio.
“Can I at least get me some Country and Western? At this point, I’ll settle for a foreign language service.”
The radio fails to lock on to a signal so he returns it to the NASA broadcast band and settles for static.
Back in the cabin of the Phaethon, Jackson watches as the Mediterranean slides quietly beneath his spacecraft. Cyprus, Turkey, Greece, Malta and the familiar shape of Italy are visible through the spotted cloud cover.
“No lights?”
The south of France and the Spanish peninsula are dark as dawn breaks over Euro
pe.
“I don’t get it,” he says, slipping his headset over his ear and hoping he’s talking to someone on Earth. “What’s happening down there? Houston, what the hell is going on?”
For the first time, Jackson considers the possibility his radio is working fine. Even if no one is listening down on Earth, he knows his flight recorder will retain two week’s worth of voice and data metrics. Whatever happens, someday someone will examine the black box so he is deliberate, documenting his thinking, reasoning, and subsequent actions.
“Okay. I have no knowledge of what has happened on Earth other than that the planet is quiet in both in radio and light emission. The lack of light pollution might be a boon for astronomers, but it’s probably not that desirable for the rest of the population.
“I’m trying to stay objective and not stress about family and friends, but it seems some kind of global calamity has occurred, something that has taken out electronics, maybe?
“What could do that? Nuclear war? What would the remnants of a nuclear blast look like from space?
“Approaching the U.S. West Coast, I can see long, thin tendrils of smoke from fires, but that could be anything. An explosion at a chemical plant, a forest fire.”
Talking himself through the details he can see helps him to be objective.
“I have enough oxygen and water to stay up here almost indefinitely, but food is going to become an issue within about a week.”
Jackson doesn’t like where this is leading.
“I can’t stay up here forever,” he says. “I’d rather not be forced down. I’d rather come down on my own terms, so I’ve got a week to figure out what the hell I’m going to do and how I’m going to do it.”
The Z Chronicles Page 20
