by Ben Stevens
Maya was still buckled into her chair and harness, her small hands folded across her lap, eyes closed. She continued her invocation song, however hard it was to hear over the noise of the ship imploding. Lucy had unbuttoned her shirt and was frantically ripping, pulling and plugging wires from the ship’s control panel into jacks in her breastbone. Other than her working arms and hands, she was as motionless as a statue, and she appeared to be withdrawn inside herself, in some sort of self-induced trance.
Just then, there came a bang with a higher pitch, a different tone, followed by an incredible hissing sound, like high-pressure gas releasing at great speed from a small opening. The hiss became more of a roar, ear-bleedingly loud.
Shit! The air! It is a vacuum! Jon thought, grimacing. He was unable to cover his ears without releasing the hammer, and he would die before he let that happen. His eyes darted around the room. Maya, strangely, seemed unfazed, though Carbine clutched both his ears. His face was awash with agony, his fists open as he palmed the flat of his blade against his head. Lucy, like Maya, seemed unaffected, though this wasn’t surprising. Jon was sure she was either mentally elsewhere or was capable of tuning out any noise she wanted. What was a surprise was that the air didn’t seem to be leaving the cabin. Despite the deafening roar of high-velocity gas, there was no sign of anything loose being sucked out or moving around, and no breeze—nothing at all except the noise.
Phew. Jon allowed himself a small moment of relief. The bardo was not a vacuum, after all.
Nothing was going out. But something was coming in. Jon spied a rent in the ship’s hull, through which the silt-smoke was starting to billow.
“They’re coming through!” Jon shouted, cocking his hammer back. He wondered how effective his swing would be in a zero-g environment but had no idea what else to do. The rolling smoke poured itself into a large globule in the cabin and began to morph into a humanoid sandstorm. Hazy columns where its legs might have been, maintained an umbilical connection to the sea outside the ship. Looking like the sand genie emerging from the proverbial bottle, the guardian of the bardo hovered in the air, surveying the room, then screamed.
The scream filled the cabin with an unearthly beast’s roar that was unlike anything Jon had ever heard before.
The nervous tension broke Jon’s cool, and he returned the animalistic shriek with his own war cry. His attempt to draw the beast’s attention worked, the genie launching straight for him. He was ready for it—or so he thought—and swung at the smoke-thing’s face. Jon couldn’t tell whether his hammer passed straight through his target ineffectively, or whether he’d missed entirely, for as soon as he fired his hammer shot, his body spiraled into a pirouette.
Dammit! Jon had wondered for a second what might happen, but his lack of zero-g experience hadn’t prepared him for this much of a blunder. The rapid spinning caused him to lose sight of the creature, as well as his bearings. He released the hammer with one hand, stretching out his arm in the hope of finding something with which to stop the spiral. Before he could locate anything solid, something found him.
It wasn’t impact that he felt, more a sort of penetration. A sudden, shocking cold was simply there, where a moment before it had not been. His guts felt beyond ice cold. There was no gradual change in temperature; it was as if someone had teleported dry ice into his chest cavity, or he had been stabbed with an enormous icicle. The spinning stopped, and he realized he was now held fast in the clutches of the smoke. Its thick, rolling substance cocooned him and pierced him. He felt as bound by the silt-smoke as he would have in chains. The cold continued to burn his insides as he struggled to overcome his ethereal restraints.
The umbilical tail that connected the creature to the raging storm outside forked and sent a tentacle-like polyp straight toward Maya, who was still chanting in her chair. Her song ended the second the ghostly appendage reached her. A soft purple glow appeared out of thin air between her and the tendril, interrupting the attack.
The smoky filament smacked into the purple shield that had grown to outline Maya’s body and splashed into a dozen directions. The different tributaries of the split smoke-tentacle regrouped in the center of the cabin near the ceiling and began to take the shape of another humanoid.
Jon could feel himself fading, like a sinking swimmer who had already run out of breath and was running on the oxygen fumes left in his blood, his brain slowly shutting down and his vision fading to black. The panicky struggle had passed, and he found himself in a state of almost serene relaxation, of surrender.
He felt his memories slipping from his mind like water through a closed fist. He couldn’t grab them. Although his vision had already faded, he closed his eyes and concentrated on one thing. Maya. Perhaps if he could not grip that thought, he could cup his hands and try to support it. Maya. Maya. To his dismay, he found he couldn’t remember what she looked like. Hold on to the idea, the idea of Maya. Please, please.
Carbine, who had been clutching his ears in pain from the thunderous noise, found sudden respite when the scream of the storm was somehow muffled. He opened his eyes, examining his hands and arms, then the rest of his body. A soft purple glow covered him and seemed to be shielding him. He glanced up and saw Maya surrounded by the same glow. Then he spotted Jon, above the stairwell near the back of the cabin, gripped by a tornado of smoke. He shouted to Jon, but his words were lost in the roar, and he flinched as a second smoke-man descended on him from above.
Just as it had before, the smoke seemed to strike a plate of glass and spread out before Carbine's face, streaming around him like a river split around a boulder. Carbine recovered from the surprise attack when he realized that the thing could not harm him, but he knew that Jon was not as fortunate. Even through the haze of the whirling smoke, he could see the very image of Jon begin to fade and become slightly transparent as if he were slowly being erased from reality.
Of course, he thought to himself, they are the white blood cells of this place. They mean to erase us!
His mind was frantic. He tried not to panic, but what to do? Carbine knew he couldn’t fight it. Maybe I can cut it off from its source?
Carbine’s intense gaze followed the smoke trail from his friend to the breach in the ship. The scream of the storm was still ringing in his ears as incessantly as the wail of an alarm klaxon, but he steeled his mind against it and focused on how to save Jon.
Carbine searched the cabin for something to cover the tear in the hull through which the smoke poured, but came up empty. Without so much as a silent Banzai!, he jumped toward the breach and used his body itself as the dividing barrier, hastily reasoning that if the shield around his body could repel the smoke, then perhaps he could sever the umbilical by flopping on top of it.
His aim was perfect. He pushed off from the chair he had been anchored to, landing belly first directly on top of the smoke creature’s umbilicus. The repelling qualities of the shield neatly cut the flow of smoke into two. He smashed through it into the floor of the cabin, and then deftly jammed his knife into the floor to prevent himself from bouncing all the way back. As soon as he recovered from the jolt, he rolled toward the breach, pushing with one hand and maintaining his death-grip on the knife handle with the other. He ended up on his back with his side slightly pressed against the wall.
Try as he might, he could not keep himself still or firmly pressed against the hull to prevent the Wardens from continuing to pour into the cabin. The zero-gravity, coupled with his awkward, feeble purchase and the need to maintain his hold on the knife proved to be too much.
He bounced back and forth between sealing the hull with his body and floating away. He bobbled. Worse still, the tornado that held Jon in its grip of erasure maintained itself autonomously; separation from the storm at large had not slowed it one bit. Jon continued to fade.
Although no one noticed, Lucy’s hands had stopped their hectic pulling, punching, and plugging, and shot out to take the ship's controls. Her eyes rolled back from white to their n
ormal forward position as her awareness returned from within itself to the world outside.
The very same instant her slender but strong hands clutched the controls, the cabin lights came back on. Maya’s head spun toward the cockpit, and her eyes lit up with hope and nervous excitement. Lucy had done it. Power returned to the listless ship.
“Look for the Drop! Look for the opening!” Maya cried over the tumultuous chaos.
Lucy didn’t so much as glance back. She set her jaw and pushed on the sticks, her thumbs simultaneously flicking the thrust.
Carbine lurched up so hard from the pitch of the ship that he nearly lost hold of his knife; Maya’s eyes seemed to bulge as she strained against the safety harness; however, the incoming smoke and the tornado with Jon in its clutches seemed completely unaffected by the sudden change of inertia.
Lucy plunged the ship through the bardo-storm at max speed, pushing down and pulling left on the controls, sending it into a sharp turn. Her face wore an expression of coolness. Despite her seemingly aloof demeanor, Carbine knew she was astute enough to know that they were in trouble—real trouble. Maya’s shields wouldn’t last forever, and even if they could, the Wardens would simply erase the ship instead of the people, damning them to float in this no-place forever.
The ship banked hard and fast, though it was nearly impossible to gauge speed when flying through the endless rolling clouds. Only the rapidity with which the ghost faces flashed by the viewport window gave any indication of how fast they were moving.
“I don’t see an opening anywhere!” Lucy yelled over the din, a hint of feverish panic in her normally cool voice.
Please let it still be open, Maya silently prayed as she shifted her frantic gaze back and forth from the viewport to Jon, who, with every passing second, looked more and more like a ghost himself. It positively killed her to watch him fade and do nothing, but there was nothing she could do. She knew that more surely than anyone else here. Unbuckling herself from her chair wouldn’t help anything at all… and then it hit her, what Carbine had done. Her shield repelled the smoke. Filled with desperate purpose, she tore at the buckle restraining her and fixed to leap toward Jon.
Freeing herself with a flick of her wrist, Maya slipped out from between the shoulder restraints and threw herself into the tornado. The smoke parted like water around a boat. There was almost no impact when her body collided with what remained of Jon’s.
If only I had managed to shape my Strange before the spirit got ahold of Jon, I could’ve protected him as well!
She wrapped her arms around Jon, like hugging a cloud, as she continued along her trajectory and slammed into the fuselage.
The jolt caused her to exclaim in pain, twisting her body, though she did not release her hold on the wisp that was Jon.
Her face remained scrunched up, but her eyes opened and witnessed with great relief the color and substance begin to return slowly but surely to Jon’s form. They floated like that for what seemed like a frozen moment in time. Jon seemed unconscious and was only beginning to return to existence, but all was right in her world despite the raging hell around them. She stared at the look of serenity on his still face like a mother watching her babe sleep, and her heart smiled.
Her victory was short-lived. The Drop-sentinel was not to be defeated. It had been spread across the room by the impact against Maya’s shield, but this time, instead of reforming into an anthropomorphic body, it simply began to grow, to multiply itself by way of some alien asexual reproduction. The swirling clouds began to fill the entirety of the cabin’s interior. Fear returned as master of Maya’s manor of thought; the thing was now erasing the ship.
Maya screamed in helpless frustration as the being returned to cocoon Jon, even though he was still in her arms. The silt poured over and around her form, avoiding her shield by just enough. She began to swat at it, but it was everywhere. Her efforts were as futile as if she were trying to slap away the air itself.
Jon began to fade again, and this time, the ship began to fade with him. Within a minute, the ghosts would have undone all of Lucy’s repair work, and the craft would return to a floating free-fall until it finally faded away to nothing. They were doomed… unless Lucy could find the way out.
The smoke wrapped itself around Lucy, and although unable to penetrate her shield, made her continuing search for the Drop extremely difficult. She let go of the sticks with one hand, and, like Maya, waved her shield-shrouded arm back and forth as if shooing a buzzing fly. It helped a little but created a kind of strobe-light effect on her vision. Like rapid blinking, her perceptions altered, but her mind was still able to string the diced-up images together and make a picture of pseudo-continuity. She scanned and scanned.
If Lucy’s heart had not been torn out of her chest years ago and replaced with a titanium and carbon-fiber mechanical pump, it would have leapt. Through the raging storm outside and growing thickness of the soul-smog inside, she caught a glimpse of blue-white color not too far off from the port bow of the wounded, dying transport. She shouted a victory yelp as she pulled the ship into a turn that would put it directly into the electric maw of dimensional freedom that was the promise of the Drop.
“I see a Drop! But I don’t know if it’s the right one!” Her voice was Olympian. Amplified by speakers in her cybernetic body, it overcame the scream of the storm.
It doesn’t matter! We have to take the risk! Maya screamed back telepathically through swatting palms and tears of impotent rage as the clouds consumed Jon before her very eyes.
More out of stoic determination than exertion, Lucy gritted her teeth and once again gripped the controls with both hands. Like a kamikaze pilot from Earth’s ancient past, she plunged the ship into the Drop without fear or regret as fast as its engines would propel them.
“Here goes.”
Lucy wasn’t one to knock on wood or cross her fingers, but somewhere deep inside, she crossed the ghost of her human heart. They all knew that if this wasn’t the same Drop they had come in through, that they could end up anywhere. Literally.
The second the ship passed the threshold, the ghost sentinels disappeared as thoroughly and suddenly as banished darkness before the glow of electric lights. For the stretch of a blink of an eye, it seemed as though their lives had been saved.
The Drop that delivered them from certain death in the bardo, however, was unlike the one that had brought them to that place; this one was not a rare high-altitude one.
The ship’s impact into the earth was abrupt and violent. The nigh-instantaneous destruction it suffered was nearly as complete as the stop it crashed to.
3
Only the faintest wisp of consciousness had returned to Jon when the transport exited the Drop.
The bardo spirit’s attack, which had nearly killed him, ended up being Jon’s saving grace: his body had not yet returned to a corporeal state when the transport slammed into the earth at top speed. The impact wrenched him free of Maya’s embrace, sending him floating and bouncing around like a balloon while everything else in and around the ship made its best impression of a detonating fragmentation grenade.
Having already had the integrity of its hull severely compromised by the ghosts, the transport came apart like so much aluminum foil when it hit. What was left by the time the last bit came to a stop resembled a slug’s trail in the sun; a glistening, silver smear across a desert plain. Jon came to as his body finished solidifying. He blinked his eyes several times in rapid succession in an attempt to clear the blur from his vision; he couldn’t even begin to describe the dull ache he felt in his… everything.
What the hell happened? The question slowly formed in his mind like a flower coming into bloom. He tasted something on his lips and realized upon reflection that he was lying face down in dry dirt. He licked his lips and spat, pushing himself upright, and slowly drew himself up into standing position. He rubbed his eyes to expedite the blur-removal and looked around.
Desert.
Where are we
? Wait… we? He squinted in the bright sunlight that bathed the desert and bounced off the metal bits that used to be the transport. He brought his hand to his brow and continued to survey the scene. Having been unconscious during the wreck, he began to panic as his mind put two and two together. A lump formed in his throat and his chest felt tight. Where is everybody? Where is Maya?
The concern erupted into full-blown panic like a strong drug coming on. Jon gave up on trying to figure out what had happened or where he was and started scurrying through the wreckage that stretched behind him for what seemed like a klick. With the frantic intensity of a starving animal digging for food, Jon rummaged through the strewn wreckage, tossing a chunk of fuselage here, flipping over a crate of stowed supplies there, looking for his companions. His mind recited the mantra of those whose growing dread matched their growing awareness of the situation at hand.
No! No, no, no, no, no, please!
He found Lucy and Ratt first. They lay tangled up in each other like two contortionists trying to re-invent the Kama Sutra. He reached down and gently shook them both. Lucy recovered instantly, her presence returning like lightning to her already open eyes. One of her arms shot out as fast as a frog’s tongue catching its dinner. Her tanto knife was clutched in the grip of its digits, its blade held a hair’s width away from Jon’s throat.
“Whoa! Easy there, easy there.”
Jon watched with relief as Lucy relaxed, lowered the knife, and said, “Help me with Ratt.”
Jon lifted as she pushed, and they gingerly plucked the kid off of her and onto a patch of ground that was relatively clear of debris.
“He is alive but unconscious. Let’s find Maya and Carbine,” Lucy said, prompting a responsorial nod from Jon.
They leapt into action, splitting up and sifting through the wreckage, each lifting and displacing the larger pieces with the ease of Hercules. Every time Jon had to exert some effort to lift a particularly heavy piece, his body was faintly lit by the same glow that had engulfed him entirely when Lucy had first injected him with the serum. The effect was eerie and made his skin look like a paper lantern.
