by Mark Tufo
“Sir!” Pender shouted. “Going to need for you to take this!” He thrust out the regulator. As far as I was concerned I was five years old and that thing was a cootie stick. I wanted nothing to do with it. Reluctantly, I grabbed it. “When I tell you, you need to put it back in.”
“It’s two hundred thousand volts, Pender.”
“You should be fine,” he said without taking his eyes off the display.
“Comforting, just comforting. I don’t know what I can bust you down to below private, but I’ll think of something.” I told him as I went back to where he’d pulled it from. I was looking at the device; it had nothing on it as far as markings, I couldn’t tell the front from the back and the bottom was identical to the top and vice versa.
“Get ready!” he shouted.
“Does it matter which way it goes in?” I twisted it around hoping for an arrow indicator or something.
“Yes!” He along with five prog engineers screamed.
“Helpful.” I hissed. I made ready, placing the regulator near to its slot.
Gerkin looked like his eyes were going to fall out of his head and roll about the floor. “Other way!”
I wanted to ask him how in the hell he knew.
“NOW!”
I closed my eyes and put it back in the way it supposedly went. The alarm didn’t so much stop as sound like it was being dragged away from us at abnormally fast speed. Like a cop car whizzing past, or the ice cream man when you can’t find any money.
“Did it work?” I asked aloud but the words were pulled from my mouth as if I were on a high mountain peak and the wind was whipping past. My body felt like it was being simultaneously pulled apart and compressed into a ball. Now, I’d been here before, artificially or chemically induced, if you take my meaning. I kept my eyes shut knowing full well things were happening around me I didn’t want to see. Like my face elongating or my skin dripping or Progs running around the size of a pug. Okay, maybe there were a few things I wanted to see. All seemed fine; I hadn’t been burned to a crisp or ripped apart into star dust, so as far as I was concerned, that was a victory. Looked like I was celebrating on my own, though.
“Pender?” I asked cautiously.
He raised a finger to shush me. I don’t like when my wife does that but I allow it because she’s the boss. Not so the case here.
“Private,” I said with a little more force. I saw one Prog smack the side of his panel in the universal technology fix gesture. Two others were staring intently at their screens. I’d like to say with disbelief, but it was tough to gauge them right now.
“Nothing, sir,” was what finally came out of Pender’s mouth.
“Context, sub-private. Nothing what?”
“There’s nothing.”
“For the love of….nothing what? No Stryver ship, no fried Twinkies in space, no end to your virginity? What does that mean?”
“We’re nowhere, sir.”
I started to rail again about the ridiculous nonsense of that and I almost stomped my foot, but then I got a bad vibe with the way those words were frosted in chill. I took two steps toward him; my plan was to smack his head into the panel a couple of times and wring out a complete answer in English, but I could see he was still trying to figure it out himself.
“There are no stars.” He looked at me like a kid who has gotten separated from his mother in an overcrowded store during Christmas time might look at a security guard. No that’s not quite right. There’s generally a flicker of hope when a kid sees that tin badge or at least a patch. Pender looked simultaneously motherless, gut punched, and ball squeezed, and not any of that tender shit but like someone was making Play Dough meatballs.
We all realize I’m not a rocket scientist or a brain surgeon, but I’m also not a sea sponge. I had some idea what he was talking about, in the abstract, but I wanted more, I needed more. We couldn’t have some fucking science fiction cliffhanger here. If I had to start making decisions, they needed to be as informed as possible.
“Private Pender, I need you to collect yourself and tell me what is going on, and please, no theoretically fascinating mumbo-jumbo. Can you do that, son?” It was strange calling someone ‘son’ who was only a few years younger than I was, but I think it steadied both of us.
“I…I don’t…sir, we…we’re nowhere. There are no celestial bodies, no mapping data; the navigation system won’t mark us.”
“Oh, so, ok, we’re lost. Or…malfunction of some kind?”
“I had hoped that as well.” He motioned for me to come join him. He clicked a few buttons and I was immediately staring at a blank screen after blank screen. I kept waiting for it to display a picture or some text, something. He brought up a half dozen camera angles, some of them even showing the hull of the ship.
“This is what’s outside this ship.”
“I don’t see anything.”
“Sir, that’s what I’m saying. This ship can scan for visuals for hundreds of thousands of miles, but space is enormous, so it’s not too strange it’s not picking anything up.”
“Right. Let’s keep that in mind.”
“But the human eye? With no atmosphere or starlight in the way, we can see for billions of light years, especially with the aid of these scanners. There…there’s nothing out there, sir.”
“Get our engineering department up here now.” I was smart enough to realize this was above my pay grade.
At this exact moment, I really didn’t even know what to think. I felt like maybe I should be concerned, but I just didn’t know enough to feel anything past “uh-oh.” We couldn’t be nowhere. We were somewhere, that was evident enough, we just weren’t anywhere we wanted to be. As far as I was concerned it was just a matter of getting back there. This was the line of reasoning I was working out when I was tossed violently to the left. Well, not just me but the entire ship. Enemy fire, asteroid strike, misfiring thrusters? Hell, I don’t know. A Prog actually helped me off the floor, I thanked him.
“Everyone alright?” I asked as I rubbed at my head where a goose egg was beginning its growth cycle.
Pender must have had a death grip on the panel, he hadn’t moved. Safe to say he wasn’t of the ilk that we just needed to get us back on the path or that we could do so easily. My engineering team was up there a few minutes after the strange collision. At least, that was what I was hoping it was and not a continuing anomaly to wherever we were. Like maybe this vacuum in space was of a super dense variety and would soon crush our ship. I voiced my concern.
“Are we in a black hole?”
I wanted all of them, any of them, to scoff at my remark, but they didn’t. They started to ponder the fucking absurdity that I had spewed forth, which really shook my confidence in the whole department on both sides. Started talking about how it was impossible to escape the pull of a black hole and about the crushing gravitational well and then the terms started getting even more scientific and harder to remember. “I was half kidding,” I mumbled.
I told them to call me if they needed anything I could help with. I wasn’t overly concerned I’d be called up soon. When I got back to the crew area, BT bombarded me with questions I didn’t have answers to. Naturally, Dee became very introspective after I told him all that had happened and what I had seen–or not.
“Do you wish to come with me?” Dee asked.
“You know what’s going on?” BT asked.
“I have an idea, though I don’t know what its implications are or what we can do about it if I am right.”
“I take it they went over three syllables in their explanation?” BT had turned to me.
“A few times,” I told him, “but there’s a pretty clear illustration on the monitors.”
“I believe I can give a more concrete example,” Dee said.
“Sir, I’ve assembled a guard detail to escort you,” Corporal Jennings said. I was going to wave it off, but what better time to strike an enemy than when you were working on bigger problems? Oh. Hold the phon
e. With that in mind…
“Captain.” I turned to BT. “Get the strike teams ready.”
“Right now? We’re in the middle of some serious…oh, I see what you’re doing. You’re pretty smart for brass.” He had that shit-eating grin and was nodding wisely.
“You’re brass too,” I told him. “Keep your radio on.”
Dee made a beeline for an airlock. I was behind him with Jennings and his detail.
“I’m not doing a spacewalk,” I told him.
“That would not be advisable,” he agreed. He opened the inner door and placed a wrench he had in his pocket onto the floor before he walked out and closed the same door.
A red warning light started to blink as he hit the button for the outer door. The wrench zipped out of the room as if it were being pulled by a rope, traveled for a few hundred yards, then immediately stopped, as if it had been tossed into a vat of heavy, wet clay. It was just stuck, it didn’t spin or move in any discernible way.
“Well, that’s weird,” I said only because it was and it seemed like something should be said.
“Weird is not an adequate word, Michael. We are in outer space. That wrench should be traveling away from this ship at the same velocity it was sucked out of the airlock for all time or until it is affected by some gravitational body.”
“Dee just tell me. You obviously have an idea or you wouldn’t have cost us that wrench with this little experiment.”
“We are not lost in space; we are stuck in time.”
“That’s why we can’t see any stars…?” Half statement half question was the way it came out.
“Light cannot penetrate time, or in this case, the lack of time,” Dee said.
“I’m not even sure what you’re saying. How are we stuck? We’re moving around.”
“I fear that if I were to do the wrench test in a few hours, it would stop much closer to our current position.”
“So, time–or the bubble that we are in, it’s collapsing? So, then what, we pop out?” I asked, knowing that would be entirely too easy and convenient.
“Quite the opposite.”
“Of course.”
“We will forever be static, living tissue statues.”
“But, this is all theoretical, right? I mean how could you possibly know?”
“I do not know conclusively, Michael, but I am leaning heavily on scientific principles and physical law, and it is my sincerest recommendation that something be done rather quickly if we wish to avoid being stuck here for all eternity.”
“So, taking over the ship?”
“Should not be our top priority,” he finished.
“Jennings, get Dee to Engineering. You need to tell them what’s going on; I left them there in a geek freak-out. I’ll be thinking of contingencies.” I told him. His look said it all. “Yes, Dee, I realize there aren’t any contingencies, but I’m not just going to sit around and wait, either. Go and tell them about your wrench thing. Maybe they can figure something out.”
“Sir?” Jennings asked.
“Go. There’s nobody here. I’ll head right back.” Jennings, Dee, and the detail quickly departed. I was alone; I stayed for a minute looking out the airlock. I can’t swear on it, but the wrench appeared to be getting dimmer, like it was sinking or being swallowed up by the aforementioned clay. “Yeah, that’s pretty scary,” I said aloud. I went back to where Tracy was recovering. She had some of her hearing back but she was still in bed, her body pretty bruised up after being tossed around in the explosion. I was going to spend some time with her before I spent all eternity with her.
Chapter 7
MIKE JOURNAL ENTRY 6
I walked into the room. The alien machines were hooked up to her and she had an IV of their go-go juice. They’d sedated her because she wasn’t too big a fan of their hyperbolic chambers. At least it had kept her safe from whatever had rocked us earlier. She looked so peaceful, her hair fanned around her head. I got a chill thinking that might be her final pose. She turned slowly and smiled.
“It must be bad.” She smiled softly as she said the words, though they came out tinny, like she said the words underwater. For all the advancements the Progs had, I found it incredible they couldn’t make a decent speaker system.
“It could be better,” I told her as I placed my hand on the glass. She pressed hers up to mine.
“Can you open this?” The smile vanished. “How bad?” she asked, groggily, her eyes half open.
“Bad enough I’d like to crawl in there with you and shut the door.”
“What are you doing here, then? Get out there and figure it out.”
“It’s all quantum physic-y. I did say one thing that was pretty smart…otherwise I’m mostly out of my realm.”
Mostly?” She smiled. “Kiss me, then you go and order those that know what they’re doing to fix this problem. You know how those science types waste all that time talking. I’ll be waiting here.”
I stood, but was reluctant to leave. “What…what if I don’t make it back here?” I asked.
“I didn’t authorize that.” She smiled again and was back asleep. I wonder if she would think this whole thing was a dream. My first instinct was to battle, to kill the enemy, to stop the incessant nightmare inducing thoughts from intruding. Quiet times were difficult for me and the best way to disable that was action. I know that sounds like trying to put out a fire by throwing every combustible at hand into it, but better the active bonfire than the smoldering one that creeps up and just engulfs you. I figure at some time we’ll run out of material to burn, but for now it worked.
“BT, we about ready to move?” I asked when I got back.
“Yeah. For what, I don’t know.”
“Me neither, not yet anyway. I realize that we all die in time, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to die by time.”
“What the fuck does that mean, Mike?” he asked.
“It means that if we’re going to turn into memorials of ourselves, when some far future space farers stumble across us, they are going to figure out that humans won this particular little battle.”
“You have no idea how much I love crazy-talk inspirational speeches from the man I’m about to follow into war.”
“Follow? Oh hell no. I’ll be right behind you.”
“My mother told me white men were the devil.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“World War I and II ring any bells? Both started by white men.”
“Well, then you just conclusively proved your point.”
“I don’t know if you agreeing with me is better or not.”
“I want to talk to you about something before we do this and I’ll take whatever you say under consideration.”
“So, you’re about to tell me something I’m most likely not going to like and are giving me the chance to voice my displeasure and reasons why it should or should not be done but ultimately we’ll be doing it anyway?”
“Dude, you nailed it.”
“Lay it on me, then.”
I told him about the bubble of time we were locked in and how it was collapsing in on us so, more than likely anything we did was for naught. But also, that on the off-chance we could escape the clutches of this time-bomb that we should use this moment of indecision against the Progs and Mutes and seize power.
“All I’m really hearing here, Talbot, is that you’re asking me which flavor of poisoned Kool-Aid I’m willing to drink.”
“Well, yeah, but there’s a slight chance we can spit it out at the last second if we suck it up just right.”
“Grape it is then.”
“Urban to English please.”
“Fight.”
“Grape means fight?”
“I hate the grape flavored one; it always upsets my stomach. When I get an upset stomach I usually want to punch things.”
I looked to both sides. “Why is it that whenever someone starts talking crazy around me there’s never anyone else around?”
“You ready to take over a ship?” he asked.
“My favorite pastime. Just let me get Tracy to a safe place and get the engineers back.”
Me and a detail went and retrieved my wife. I told the doctors there they should lock the doors behind us, they didn’t even question it. Dee and the engineers were a different story. They flat out refused.
“Michael, if we leave now it will not matter the outcome of your battle,” Dee had told me over the radio.
“This is a blood war, Dee. I’m going to annihilate as many of the enemy as it takes for them to capitulate. I would think the same rules apply for them.”
“We have made an accord; our engineers and theirs, that no matter what happens on the rest of the ship, we will work together toward the greater good.”
“You don’t like what I’m doing?” I didn’t think anything he could say would stop me, but his words would have weight.
“There is a time and a place for everything. It is my personal thought that what we do here holds precedence over any past wrongs or scars, and I will continue to try to save us from this immediate fate. But I do not doubt your motives, Michael. You are driven by a purpose and possibly a guiding hand that I cannot divine; it is not up to me to judge your actions. I would rather my friend not continually place himself directly in harm’s path, but I know this war will not end without great sacrifices from us all. I only wish that no injury befalls you.”
“Same here,” I told him. “Good luck, Dee.”
“They’re not coming back here?” BT asked. “It’s safer here.”
“They’ve barricaded themselves in engineering and are going to try and get us out of this current mess.”
“We’re not getting them then?” BT seemed deflated.
“No. I’ve got a feeling this is the way it’s supposed to play out.”
“I’d like to be in this fight,” Paul said as the troops chosen to go on this mission were gearing up.
“We might be risking our lives for nothing,” I told him.
