Furnace

by Joseph Williams

  Anyway, I was still somewhat under the illusion of the Glorious Death in the Line of Duty during those first hours on Furnace, so I tried to convince myself I was lucky to die in a (sort of) battle, like some great Viking warrior or an explorer from a bygone era.

  So I accepted my fate. Braced for it. Tried self-consciously to reflect on a life ill-spent in the cold, damp corridors of a dozen fleet vessels.

  And then there was another screech beside me, followed by a low grunt. The latter made my ears perk up and my eyes snap open.

  What the hell’s going on? I wondered. I was surprised none of them had claimed me yet when I could heard them so near. I reasoned that maybe they knew they had me trapped and wanted to savor the moment, or maybe they were still fighting over the right to burn me alive limb by limb.

  When I heard human voices though, quickly followed by the unmistakable reports of heavy IO pulse rifles in the distance, I began to have my doubts.

  Salib? I wondered, struggling to my knees to see through the waves of heat and the writhing swarm of bodies.

  IO pulse rifles aren’t standard for a peaceful mission of exploration on an uncharted planet, which is absolute bullshit as far as I’m concerned. When else will you need your heaviest artillery except when you have no idea what you’re up against? Hearing them told me all I needed to know about the state of the squad. Things must have gotten bad while I was gone.

  Really bad.

  “Chalmers?” a voice called to me between pulse-rifle reports.

  After the initial blasts, my hearing went away for a while. The last thing I remember before I started alternating through degrees of consciousness was an unrecognizable fleet soldier (I think it was Sillinger, but I’m not sure to this day) dragging me along the terrain to a hover-gurney and sprinting me to the mountainside. We entered a cave at some point and someone said, “Jesus Christ, he looks bad,” before shoving a pill down my throat and shooting me up with a tranq.

  Then I was gone a while.

  But alive.

  I guess I should be grateful.

  THE HOLDOUTS

  Never once during my marathon through the desert or my encounter with the carnival of horrors at the lava lakes did it occur to me that I had gotten off easy. It was impossible, really. My entire life prior to that mission told me so. And yet, as Salib relayed the events between the clown-thing crushing my helmet and when Sillinger performed emergency surgery on my stomach in the cave darkness, I realized that it could have been a hell of a lot worse for me. Namely, I could have been with the rest of the ground crew when the first wave of natives attacked.

  “How many survived?” I asked Salib.

  Her perpetual scowl deepened and she stared at me like she couldn’t tell whether or not I was joking. I’m not one to make jokes of any kind during combat, though. Least of all about recent KIAs from the company that just saved my ass. It took her a moment to draw that conclusion—we didn’t know each other very well—but eventually she must have decided I really was as clueless as I sounded. In retrospect, I’m almost embarrassed that there was even a sliver of doubt in her mind. I must have come off like a complete asshole to her in our limited interactions.

  “You’re looking at everyone that’s left,” she told me.

  Her voice was hoarse, probably from shouting directions to her troops when the comms went out. Not that it would have done much good. Once the creatures attacked and the bullets started to fly, there was little chance they could have heard her over the noise.

  It took a few seconds for her words to register. Blame it on the drugs from Sillinger’s emergency procedure. By the time I realized her squad had lost more than half its complement just in the time we’d been separated (four to six hours by my estimation, maybe more), I was speechless. I couldn’t even offer an empty condolence to her for losing the soldiers she was charged with protecting, losses which I could tell weighed heavily on her just by the way her eyes locked onto the darkness and refused to release their grip.

  I kept quiet for a while. It seemed like the right thing to do.

  After patching me up with some adhesive first-aid foam to close the wound front and back, then sticking some medicated gauze on the cuts along my neck and left bicep, Sillinger began working on one of the soldiers holed up in the shadows near the cave-mouth. I couldn’t see who exactly was left alive, though, and I was afraid to ask while the literal and figurative wounds were still so fresh. Eventually, however, the silence hanging between myself and Salib became too uncomfortable to endure.

  “Was it the group outside?” I asked, carefully omitting the second half of the question. I didn’t need to explain what I meant. “The ones by the lava?”

  Salib stood and dusted off her pulse rifle. “No. There’s others closer to the ship. We ran into these motherfuckers trying to get away from the first group.” She swallowed hard and adjusted her utility belt, trying to look official and preoccupied though I could tell she was really trying to stifle the memory of the massacre that had driven them over the mountains. It didn’t look like she was winning. “The others are worse.”

  “Worse?” I shuddered at the idea. I guessed I really had gotten off easy. Then again, nothing they’d described so far was quite the same as the razor-toothed grin of the clown corpse pursuing me across the desert. I wasn’t sure how or why, but I knew it was still following.

  He, I thought suddenly. It’s a he.

  I pushed the notion aside for the time being.

  “You’re lucky we found you. If we’d headed back to the ship five minutes earlier, we’d be gone and those bastards would have eaten you alive.”

  She leaned back against the cave wall with a thoughtful expression that I didn’t like. I could see the wheels turning behind her eyes and recognized how her grief-stricken rationale was veering toward a very dark place, particularly regarding her opinion of me. It made no real sense, but I’ve seen soldiers who’ve recently lost squad-mates blame civilians or troopers they’ve saved after sustaining heavy casualties, even when the two occurrences were only tangentially related at best (or worst, depending on your view).

  The truth, of course, is that I could very well have died (and nearly did) before they rescued me, but it wouldn’t have had any bearing on whether the others in Salib’s squad lived or died. I saw the cogs of her grief-arithmetic spun inside her head anyway. She was weighing my life against the others.

  As if to confirm my fears, she moved her gaze in the direction of the wounded troops near the cave-mouth. “If we hadn’t found you, the rest of my squad would still be alive,” she said softly.

  “So what’s next, sir?” I asked quickly, trying to lead her away from any resentful thoughts, while also subtly reminding her that she was still in charge of the survivors and we were holding out between two groups of flesh-eating devils. Not the ideal occasion to indulge personal grudges. “How far away is the ship?”

  Scowling, Salib turned her attention back my way and started walking briskly toward me. “What the fuck does it matter? We were attacked right outside the goddamned door of the ship, Lieutenant. There’s no way the captain and the rest of the crew survived. And even if they did, we have no way of getting back to them. We’re stuck here.” She leaned over me, cords of misdirected, helpless anger standing out in her neck. “We’re fucked,” she whispered.

  I guess she may have whispered so the wounded wouldn’t hear the grim pronouncement, but at the time, it sure as hell seemed like she was aiming for some spitefully dramatic emphasis. Blaming me for the loss of her crew, I thought, then adding insult to injury by reminding me our situation was hopeless. It was, but it wasn’t my acting C.O.’s job to tell me so. Her job was to figure a way out of the impossible for us, or at least lead us to believe there was a way out as long as we had breath in our lungs.

  Sillinger tapped her on the shoulder and nodded toward the other troops. “We’ve got to get them out of here. I can stop the infections for the most part and try to patch them up,
but a couple of them won’t make it regardless. The wounds are too close to major arteries.” He paused for a moment, swallowing hard and clearly suppressing a grimace. “The teeth cut them to the bone.”

  Salib nodded slowly, thinking, then pointed her rifle at me. “What about this asshole? How come you were able to save him?”

  Eyes widening defensively, Sillinger shrugged. “I don’t know, sir. His wounds weren’t as serious.”

  “He was cut through the stomach all the way out his back. You want to tell me that none of his internal organs were damaged, but every goddamned one of my wounded soldiers is going to die?” Salib hissed.

  It was clear there was nothing I could do or say to appease her. I had unwittingly assumed the role of scapegoat for her helplessness and failures as a commanding officer, and Sillinger realized it, too. The very breath in my lungs offended her. She was out for blood, and mine was the easiest to spill because I wasn’t one of her own.

  Worse, I had the audacity to live when others had died.

  Time to go, I thought.

  While her attention was still focused on Sillinger, I slid along the wall in the opposite direction until I was completely covered in shadow. If she wanted to shoot me, I thought, she’d have to find me first. I couldn’t imagine things escalating to that extreme with her squad significantly depleted already. But twenty-four hours earlier, I couldn’t have imagined a single goddamned thing about that planet or what would happen to me there. For all I knew, my life was even more expendable to her now that death was a certainty for all of us. If she’d truly lost hope, what did fleet regulations matter to her? What the hell could the fleet do to her if she killed me? Court-martial her corpse? And even if she did survive the ordeal and make it safely home to be questioned by the Department of Internal Affairs, she could easily say that I—like dozens of others—had been killed while valiantly combatting the natives. Nothing was preventing her from killing me.

  “Sir, I...” Sillinger started. He did his best not to look in my direction so she wouldn’t follow his gaze. God bless him for that.

  “Why is he still alive?!” Salib shouted, gripping the back of his neck. Spittle flung from her mouth and slapped against his cheek, but Sillinger didn’t notice. He was too scared and confused to answer, or really do anything but stare wide-eyed and hold his hands up defensively.

  “I don’t know, sir!” he protested.

  She drove him back against the wall. “What about the infection?”

  Sillinger began stammering an answer or excuse, but he never finished. Salib tightened her grip and slammed his head against the cave wall with enough force to make me groan.

  “You’re fucking useless,” she said.

  I squatted quietly in the darkness, afraid to move in case the sound drew her attention. Sillinger was still alive, but barely conscious and bleeding from the base of his skull. The damage may have been little more than a concussion, but I thought it was more likely that his head had cracked open. Either way, Salib wasn’t about to leave anything to chance. Apparently, she truly believed the only trained field medic left on her team was ‘useless’ and expendable. She brought the pulse rifle up to bear and blew his head off without hesitation. Bits of bone and gore flew everywhere, showering Salib and splattering against my shins. The smell of scorched flesh was almost as bad as the clown demon’s breath.

  What the hell do I do now? I wondered.

  I was stunned by my lack of emotion at Sillinger’s murder, but I’d seen a lot of shit that day. As far as deaths and nightmares went on Furnace, in fact, Sillinger’s murder was one of the easier ones to witness. Ashamed as I am to admit it now, the most pressing concern for me right then was where I could go to avoid Salib, not how I could sneak up behind her and avenge the death of the man who’d saved my life twice in the preceding half-hour. Salib and the survivors from her squad stood between me and the cave-mouth, and I had no idea what lurked in the shadows behind me. All I knew was that if there were monsters like the demon clown in broad daylight, then it stood to reason that there would be even more formidable terrors where only darkness lived.

  What will it be, then?

  It sounds awful, but I had to admit that fighting humans—even fellow soldiers—was far more desirable than fighting monsters. Was it worth the shame, though? Was it better to let Salib kill me than take advantage of my brothers and sisters bleeding out in a cave hundreds of trillions of light-years from home?

  Damn it, I thought.

  I was only a couple hours removed from wishing for the quick release of death on the planet’s surface, and yet there I was, plotting the murders of fellow humans. And for what? Another chance to face the nightmares outside the cave? To live another hour or two in the grating wind before they subjected me to torture far worse than the receiving end of Salib’s pulse rifle? It was absurd. I’d like to chalk up that initial reaction to irrational fear, or even the drugs Sillinger gave me after surgery. The truth is, though, I was thinking the same way any human would have in that situation. That’s not an excuse, either. It’s just fact. We’re all instilled with survival instincts from birth which (occasionally) overwhelm our senses of honor and duty. Otherwise, our species never would have risen to supremacy on Earth, let alone advanced to the point of spreading humanity’s seeds across the galaxy. It still makes me cringe, but in that moment, I was consumed by the hard-coded desire for self-preservation, no matter the consequences.

  Then again, it had been a while since I’d seen the clown demon. I guess I’d lost perspective on just how steep the consequences could be for leaving the cave.

  “CHALMERS!” Salib suddenly screamed. Her back was turned to me. She gripped the pulse rifle tightly and examined the remnants of her squad. “YOU’RE A FUCKING DEAD MAN!”

  The testicle-shrinking boom of her voice made me jerk backwards so hard that my head slammed against the cave wall. I cursed under my breath. Just loud enough for her to hear it.

  “Damn it…”

  She swiveled around to face me.

  “Damn it,” I repeated.

  The first blast from her pulse rifle exploded into the wall three feet behind me. A minor miscalculation on her part, and one I couldn’t count on again now that the cavern had lit up long enough for her to spot me.

  Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck…

  We locked stares. My courage withered beneath her cold resolve. I knew by the look she gave me that she was prepared to kill me without further parley. If I was lucky, she’d use the pulse rifle. From what I could tell, though, she wasn’t against finishing me with her bare hands.

  I scrambled deeper into the cave, trying to make as little commotion as possible but with little success. I had all the subtlety of a hurricane.

  “Sir!” I shouted over my shoulder, wholly negating the small measure of stealth I’d won in my escape bid. “Calm down!”

  “Fuck you,” she growled through clenched teeth.

  I could practically feel the heat of her combat-breath searing the medicated gauze on the back of my neck. She was close.

  Damn it damn it damn it…

  I struggled to unclasp my armor plating so I could move more freely through the tight, winding corridors ahead, but it wound up slowing me down and the noise made me easier to track. I eventually gave up and just started running as fast as I could while feeling my way along the wall.

  Right up until I ran face-first into a rock and dropped like Kalak bomber, that is.

  The world erupted in white light momentarily and I realized that another shot had been fired behind me.

  Oh no…

  I didn’t feel pain right away so I figured she’d just missed me, but then the nerves in my cheeks and chest lit up like livewires and I cursed loudly. Contorting my face only made things worse, though, and I forgot all about Salib and her pulse rifle while I writhed back and forth on the wet ground.

  When I opened my eyes again, I saw that the wall directly above me was smoldering from a pulse charge. The i
mpact had saved me, then. If I’d dropped a moment later or kept running, the shot would have caught me in the back of the head and my brains would have exploded across the cave like Sillinger’s. Instead, Salib’s blast smacked the wall, and a moment later, the cave lit up again with white light.

  Only this time, it hadn’t come from Salib’s rifle. It was Charlotte Rayford who’d fired. She was bleeding from a crooked nose. The right side of her face was torn to shreds and her teeth were exposed where her cheek had burned away. She looked like absolute shit, and I knew immediately that she’d been one of the troopers Sillinger pronounced a lost cause before Salib blew his head off.

  I forced myself up on my left elbow for a better look.

  Salib stared at me with such palpable venom in her eyes that I jerked back again, as though the intensity of her hatred alone could incinerate me. I held her gaze for a moment, frozen with indecision, and then the muscles in her face slackened and she leaned against the cave wall. Her feet gradually slipped out from under her and she hit the ground with a graceless thud that made me wince. I could hear bones and cartilage crack in her face with the extra force of the planet’s gravity on top of them. Charlotte had caught her in the back of the head, but she’d also hit the life-support controls on her suit, which must have shorted the gravity equalizers.

  I watched her die, then turned to Charlotte. Her helmet light was on and glared directly into my eyes, but I could still see she only had an hour left to live at the very best. She was braced against the wall with one knee on the cave floor and her head hung down so her chin touched her chest. I gave her an inquisitive look and she shrugged half-heartedly.