Water.
I focused on breathing, calculating the amount of energy it would take to stand.
You can’t quit now. Not when you’re this close to making it.
I wasn’t sure what ‘making it’ meant or whether it would even be worth the trouble, but I knew I at least had to try after everything I’d been through.
Water.
I opened my eyes and shifted my weight slightly, suddenly aware that my muscles were stiffening at an alarming rate. I was dehydrated. The longer I waited to find water, the worse the pain would get.
Don’t worry, my mother’s voice called out from the corridor directly across the way. Her severed head was propped on the grated walkway, staring at me.
Wherever you go, I will find you, she mouthed. Her lips curled back in a cruel smile. Black bile seeped through her teeth.
No…
I blinked and she was gone.
I struggled to my feet using the wall for support, only crying out once when I put too much pressure on my swollen knuckles, then turned back toward the darkness. I was convinced I’d be staring back down the maintenance shaft of the ancient spacecraft. The one that had carried the Devil to eternal exile. But there was nothing. Just a solid, steel wall with the Hummel’s fleet designation stamped across it and an arrow to the nearest emergency medical supply kit.
Water, or bandages? I wondered.
I decided yet again that water had to be my primary objective. Once I had a drink, I could collapse somewhere and patch myself up with the med kit as thoroughly as possible until I located one of the three doctors aboard the Hummel. They weren’t all trained for medical emergencies but I figured I was better off enlisting their help than one of the rough fleet officers, who usually didn’t know what to make of a med kit unless they were treating a common battlefield injury like a sprained wrist. Even then, I didn’t trust their ‘expertise’.
I aimed for the corridor where I’d seen my mother’s head and tried—unsuccessfully—to block the image from creeping into my thoughts. I was too exhausted to be frightened or even repulsed by it, though. Those nightmares didn’t start until I was safely within the boundaries of our solar system again.
Even now, I don’t know how I managed to navigate the three hundred feet of banking corridors to the mess hall without falling over dead or unconscious. Maybe it was the idea that the clown king might appear from the shadows behind me and decide he’d changed his mind: I would have to hang myself over the altar of the golden-domed cathedral, after all, or stake myself to the wall like the others.
He never appeared though, and eventually I reached the mess hall. The lights over the food processing stations were blinding after such prolonged darkness, but I was glad for the clarity even if it gave me a migraine (which it did). My luck didn’t end there, either. Apparently, even if the captain had assigned crews to gather resources for rationing, they hadn’t reached the bottom decks yet. There was plenty of water left in the still-tank and a mountain of nutrient bars stacked in a bin by the sink. I binged on both. In fact, I drank so much water that I vomited on the mess hall floor, and then drank some more to offset the lost fluids.
The next twenty minutes or so passed in a fog. I heard faint explosions high overhead, probably on the bridge level, but they didn’t concern me all that much. I was just happy to be alive, on a fleet ship, and with an opportunity to rest for a moment even if it meant I’d be worse off in the long run. I couldn’t go any further until I’d rested. I was sure of it. I could feel death creeping up on me in every shadow, every breath.
You made it, I thought.
I could picture the clown king grinning at me with his black gums and razor-sharp teeth. Shaking his head.
Not yet, he mouthed.
I closed my eyes and shuddered.
Explosions suddenly rocked the bottom deck a few hundred feet from my position. I heard frantic shouts. Someone barking orders. It didn’t mean shit to me.
But it will. Soon.
“Damn it,” I groaned, getting to my feet for what I swore would be the last time before I slept a week straight.
Brushing the caked dirt and blood from my face with the arm of my suit, I limped over to the emergency weapons locker near the mess hall entrance and used my code to break the latch. Alarms started ringing immediately, but I didn’t think anyone would notice or care with everything else happening aboard the Hummel just then.
I carefully selected an SX-70 from the trio of weapons and checked to make sure it was loaded. It was. I flipped the safety off and shuffled back into the corridor, aiming toward the shouts and explosions that continued rattling the ship’s bowels.
Chalmers’ last stand, I thought to myself, feeling every bit a gunslinger as I stumbled down the passage.
Within moments, a group of fleet soldiers started running toward me. They didn’t acknowledge me at all except as an obstacle in their escape path. Indistinct shapes trailed them from the darkness, but none of the soldiers were firing.
Elizabeth Gallagher—the Crown Representative who didn’t have a sneeze of combat experience anywhere on her otherwise impressive resume—brought up the rear of the group. She was the only one firing at the pursuing shadows and all she had to work with was a YK pistol, which was the weakest weapon on board. One specifically issued to Crown Representatives on deep space missions with the caveat that they weren’t to be used unless ‘all other options had been exhausted’. It was a suicide weapon, in other words. An insurance policy so that valuable Earth intel could not be leaked through torture or other methods of extraction.
God, I loved her in that moment. Not in a romantic way, necessarily. Not even platonic. I don’t know how or why exactly, whether it was the futility of firing a YK into an onrushing horde that wanted to tear her apart and desecrate her corpse, or the fact that she was the only one among a group of trained fleet soldiers who was firing anything at the enemy. It took balls, and I respected the hell out of her.
She nearly tackled me as she ran past, still staring back into the growling shadows at the end of the corridor which had at last begun to flood into view. The impact startled her so badly that she squeezed the trigger and nearly pasted me through the eye, but I was too tired to care.
For a lingering moment, she stayed pressed against me, studying my face as if she were decoding every misery that had befallen me since leaving the Hummel and couldn’t believe what she saw. Then the distance cleared from her eyes and she locked onto me with startling clarity. With relief.
“The engines just came back on line but the ship’s overrun.”
I nodded weakly and directed her behind me.
“Run,” I told her.
She did, but not before firing another three shots into the onrushing demons.
I stared them down as they approached. Their expressions were indistinct in the dim illumination of the ship’s bowels, and that was oddly disappointing. I wanted to see their faces twist in agony when the SX bullets ripped through them. I wanted to see them hurt.
Oh well, I thought. I’ll settle for pissing on their corpses afterward.
I opened fire with the semi-automatic and blew those bastards to hell before they were within ten feet of me. Damn, it felt good, even though the recoil against my chest made my vision treble and my legs weaken.
Once they were all dead (or something like it), I staggered down the corridor in the general direction Gallagher and the others had retreated. Gallagher was waiting for me, standing with legs locked, arms down at the sides of her official Crown uniform, the YK pistol gripped firmly in her right hand like some action hero of a bygone era. Back before the stakes had been so high.
“How many more?” I asked. My voice sounded a little better than it had before. I don’t think it will ever be quite the same.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Comms just went down again, but engines are running. We have crews on every deck trying to clear them out.”
By ‘them’ she meant the natives, an
d it was encouraging to hear there was a coordinated effort to drive them off the ship. Although, if the example I’d just seen from our soldiers was any indication of the level of efficiency with which the monsters were being engaged, I thought our chances of survival were slim.
It was heartening, at least, to see how thoroughly the SX 70 had done away with them. After being on the surface so long, I’d gotten this notion that the creatures were practically invincible simply because they were beings of mythological import. I couldn’t kill a goddamned demon, right? Is that even possible? I can say now with utter certainty that yes, you can blow a demon’s head off with a pulse rifle and tear it to shreds with an SX 70. They won’t get back up again. Not unless their clown king touches them. He’s the one who keeps them going, you know. The account in the ancient ship says they get weak as soon as they leave the planet’s surface, too, which explains why I was able to kill them with relative ease on the roofs of Tscharia and in the bowels of the ship. They draw power directly from the soil of their cursed planet. And as much as they must despise captivity, the land is their lifeblood. It sustains them. It gives them strength.
Rifles don’t work on all of them, of course. The red masks—also known as the Watchmen—for instance, must be higher up on the food chain, and some of the bigger, eviler ones are probably a bitch to bring down. But the demons on the ship were no worse than Kalak, which doesn’t necessarily mean they were weak. Far from it. Just that the playing field had been leveled, or at least minutely tilted back in my favor.
“You’d better get to the bridge,” Gallagher told me, pulling me back from my thoughts. She eyed me curiously, gently touching the swollen knuckles of my right hand. “Or maybe you should sit this one out.”
“No,” I shook my head. “They need me.” I meant for clearing out the demons, but she didn’t take it that way.
“They don’t need a navigator yet,” she said. “They just want to jump off the planet.”
I turned and started down the corridor in the opposite direction. The way the demons had come. The elevators weren’t far from there.
“Wait,” Gallagher said, jogging after me. “I’m coming, too.”
I didn’t try to stop her despite her political rank, which mandated that I lock her in a safe room until the ordeal was over. But I did stoop and grab a rifle from the corpse of a fleet soldier slouched in front of the elevator. I tried not to look at the demons too closely but it was hard to turn away. Death wasn’t much of an improvement for them, aesthetically speaking.
I pressed the call button on the lift and we waited in silence until the blast doors opened, then I stepped into the cylindrical capsule and she quickly followed.
“You forgot to check in with me before you left,” she said, eyeing the gore that covered me from head to toe. The burns on my face from alien blood must have looked hideous, but she didn’t seem repulsed. And the scars did heal, by the way. It just took a hell of a long time and a hell of a lot of ointment. “I could have pulled you off the surface team. You didn’t have to go through…all of that.”
I shrugged and checked the ammo register on the SX. “I don’t think it would have made a difference.” I cleared my throat and leaned back against the wall of the capsule. “Besides, if it wasn’t me, it would have been someone else. I wouldn’t want that on my conscience. I have enough already.”
Her eyes wandered to the floor thoughtfully and she sighed. “I know.”
The elevator doors sprang open and I saw the carnage on the bridge for the first time.
DEPARTURE
I may never know exactly how close the ship came to being overtaken, but I deduced from the piles of corpses—human and alien—surrounding the elevator that it had been a very near thing, indeed. It surprised me that most of the corpses weren’t human or demon. They were alien races, many of which I’d glimpsed around the lava lakes and in the corpse fields. Evidently, some had broken free and were just as desperate to get the hell off of Furnace as we were. Maybe the crew would have been open to them hitching a ride if we’d found a way to communicate within our accelerated timeline, but I don’t blame either party for the gory mess on the bridge. It was the planet’s fault. In their desperation to leave, the aliens had stormed the ship. The fleet soldiers had misunderstood their intentions and opened fire on them, which led to the aliens themselves attacking. A battle to the death ensued between two miserable peoples with a common enemy.
Nobody’s fault. We all just wanted to survive.
“Chalmers!” someone shouted as I surveyed the carnage.
A figure rose from the pilot’s chair with one abrupt wave.
Teemo, I realized. No shit.
He didn’t look any worse for wear, and the sight of him in his normal seat was a welcome surprise.
I looked around and made a quick inventory of the remaining officers. All fleet personnel who held any level of command had be on the bridge then, I thought, or else they were already dead.
The thought made Gibbons’ absence all the more troubling.
“Where’s the captain?” I asked, limping toward my station behind the pilot’s chair.
Gallagher and Rosie Iglesias exchanged a quick, weighted glance.
“The captain’s not himself,” Gallagher answered.
I collapsed into the navigator’s chair and groaned. “Is he dead?” I asked.
“No,” she said flatly.
I wanted to ask more but knew it wasn’t the right time. Whether the skeleton crew thought they needed a navigator or not, I was supposed to be there with them.
“Start her up, Rosie,” Teemo called from the pilot’s chair while he made the adjustments only helmsmen and captains truly understand.
“Are sensors back online?” I asked, beginning my own pre-flight checks to make sure we wouldn’t blast directly into a passing meteor or worse. It didn’t do much good. I was still more or less blind, unless the scanners were right and there was truly nothing above the planet but space itself. I still had trouble believing it.
“Somewhat,” Rosie answered as she powered the FTL drive.
I’ve never been happier to hear an engine-roar in my life. Maybe we weren’t going to make it home, I thought, but we just might get off of Furnace. That was enough for me. I’d have rather taken my chances in deep space with nothing in sight—probably dying within weeks—than spend another moment on that godforsaken planet. At least out in space no one would be hunting us.
But you’ll still be within the clown king’s influence, I realized with horror. He can still pull you back. You won’t get away fast enough.
I hadn’t given the demon’s sphere of influence much thought until then, but it was true. If he could pull us out of our own galaxy, what could stop him from pulling us out of his own planet’s orbit?
“Shit!” I hissed, slamming my fist against the control panel.
“What is it?” Teemo asked.
“Nothing,” I said. After a moment, I resumed my pre-flight checks. No matter what happened, I decided, we had to at least try. Maybe the clown king had transported me back to the ship because he’d decided to let us go. I didn’t trust his motive if that was the case, but it was too late to ask questions.
“Engines are a go,” Rosie said from the engineering station.
“Pilot is a go,” Teemo confirmed.
“Doesn’t look like we’ll run into anything,” I said.
“Then let’s get the hell out of here,” Gallagher piped in. She’d assumed command while I was on the surface, which wasn’t all that surprising considering the captain was tucked away somewhere. Probably the brig. She was the only one left on the ship with any real diplomatic authority once the captain was removed from command. The other officers on board were either dead, occupied, or stuck on the surface. In the chain of military command, I technically should have been in charge, and then Lao Gang if something happened to me, and Rosie if something happened to both of us, but I didn’t want command. Not then. I was too godda
mned tired to be the one making decisions.
“Ten seconds,” Rosie announced from the engineer’s station. “Get ready, Teems.”
“Understood,” he replied.
Once the engines were fully on line, timing the pilot controls for the initial thrust to propel the ship off the surface was a delicate art. Teemo is one of the best at it, though, and Rosie has her own sterling reputation which I can finally vouch for. The two of them executed a seamless transfer as soon as the engine prep hit zero and the first thrust dug us out of the crater.
“We’re in the air,” Teemo confirmed.
I quickly locked in coordinates just beyond the planet’s orbital field. I didn’t want to push us too much farther than that until I knew exactly what the ship was capable of handling. No one had briefed me on the precise condition of the Hummel yet and I didn’t want to plot a jump that would fry another set of systems and maybe send us hurtling back toward the surface. Once we were out in the black sea again, we could re-evaluate our position and see if there was any way to catch a signal relaying our coordinates or at the very least, point us in the general direction of the nearest civilization. The prospects still weren’t good, but we had to tackle one problem at a time.
“Lao,” Gallagher called to the Master Gunner, who nodded silently and left the bridge.
“What’s he doing?” I asked as we separated from the planet.
She crossed the bridge and put her hand on my shoulder, leaning over to get a look at the navigation screens. “He’s going to blow up the city,” she said.
I finished making course corrections, which were pretty standard for the time being. Certainly not the on-point calculations the Master Navigator who’d trained me would have liked, but even punching in the commands made my whole body cry out in agony. Somewhere on the surface, a demon was getting his meal.
Maybe we’re out of range, I thought.
But not from the clown king. I didn’t think I’d ever get far enough away from his reach. It was all a matter of whether or not he decided to exert himself to that degree.
Furnace Page 23
