by Stuart Clark
“I’ve waited so long for this,” he chuckled behind her. “You don’t know how long I’ve waited for this.”
Kate struggled to get to her feet, but only pitched headlong into the dirt again. Behind her, she could hear Kit fumbling with his belt, laughing. Her mind struggled to comprehend the situation. She simply couldn’t believe this was happening. Not to her. Not here. Like this.
Where was Wyatt, she wondered. Why wasn’t he here? Her eyes filled with tears. “No,” she sobbed. She wished now that she hadn’t gone wandering alone.
But she was not alone. Through the trees, eyes watched.
* * * * *
Wyatt went to check his watch and remembered that he’d lost it. Beneath the trees it was gloomy at the best of times, but it was getting darker. Dusk was giving way to twilight and soon night would fall. He checked his watch again and tutted himself for finding the back of a naked wrist again.
Suddenly there was a commotion from behind him and Wyatt spun, gun ready, to see Gon-Thok crashing through the scrub, clearly agitated about something. He had never seen it like this.
“Hey, hey, what’s the rush? Are you better now? Find water? Yes?” He looked at it. It had clearly had a long soak and looked much better.
Gon-Thok shook its head.
“No?” Wyatt frowned. “What do you mean no? I can see you’ve had a bath.”
Gon-Thok threw its arms up in mock surrender, a sign Wyatt recognized. “Stop?” he asked it. “We are stopped. What? You want us to stop here for the night? We can’t. It gets too cold for us, we have to press on.”
Gon-Thok was still shaking its head, bug eyes waggling.
“No. No you don’t want to stop? Is that it?” Wyatt was exasperated. “Look, I don’t know what you mean and I don’t have time to find out. We’ve got to find the others and get moving.”
“Chee-men-wi,” it said, recognizing the word.
“Others. Yes. We have to find them.” Kate and…Kit. Wyatt froze in fear, thinking now he understood what the alien was trying to tell him. No, stop, no, he thought to himself. Kate and Kit. “Shit,” he said under his breath. He looked at the alien, determined. “Where?”
* * * * *
He was on top of her now and she was powerless to stop him. He was trying to pull her panties down over her hips and grunting and cursing with the effort. It all seemed so unreal. Like a nightmare happening to someone else. She sobbed silently into the dirt.
From above her there was a click and she looked up to see the toes of two muddy boots.
“Get off her!”
Kit looked up at the voice and found himself looking down the barrel of what seemed to him to be a very large gun. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t just kill you here and let you rot?”
Kit smiled a sinister grin. “Because underneath the skin, you and I are just the same.”
Wyatt shook his head. “That’s where you’re wrong.”
“Oh, I don’t think so. You’re a crim, just like me, and I don’t take orders from other crims.”
“Not even when they’re holding a gun to your head?” Wyatt jabbed the gun in his face a bit more, making Kit flinch away from it. “Huh?”
Kate stared at Wyatt in shock. He cast her a glance. He knew that this moment was inevitable, that she would find out sooner or later, but he didn’t want it to be like this. He had wanted to tell her on his own terms.
Kit saw it and it dawned on him that he’d unleashed a monster. “Oh you didn’t know?” he asked Kate in a mocking tone, enjoying the unfolding drama.
“Shut up!” Wyatt snapped at him.
“Yeah, the government’s got the number of your hero.”
“Shut up!” Wyatt shouted.
“Or what? You gonna kill me?”
The gun was still trained on him but shaking in Wyatt’s hand, who was clearly wrestling with demons inside his head. Kit’s face turned ashen. He’d overdone the show of bravado, he’d pushed Wyatt too far and now he was going to pay with his life. The sneer evaporated off his features.
Wyatt bit his top lip, bringing it down into his mouth. His eyes looked wet, like he was holding back tears. He looked at Kate and her aghast face made the decision for him. This was all getting to be too much for her. She had not escaped one horror only to witness another. Time stood still for what seemed like an eternity. He blew out a long breath which up until then he had been holding and lowered his gun. “Give me your weapon and get out of my sight.”
Kit unbuckled his gun and dropped it where he stood. He glanced briefly at Wyatt before giving the alien, which had appeared behind him, a long hard stare. Then he turned and disappeared through the foliage.
Wyatt looked down at Kate. She was picking herself up, gathering the tattered remains of her T-shirt around her to cover herself. “Are you all right?” He realized before he’d finished asking that it was a stupid question. Of course she wasn’t all right. She had almost been raped.
She sniffed and nodded tentatively but would not look at him. He wanted to hold her so badly then, to tell her that everything would be okay, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He thought that the last thing she wanted right now was another man’s arms around her, that she might misconstrue the gesture as him taking advantage of her at her most vulnerable.
“It wasn’t your fault,” he told her. “I won’t leave you again.” It was almost an apology.
She knew he meant here, on this world, but she wanted him to mean forever.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go get you cleaned up.”
He offered her his hand.
* * * * *
They found Kit sitting among their packs when they returned. Wyatt handed his gun to Kate. “Here, keep this pointed at him, and if he moves, shoot him.”
“What?” Kit began, rising from his seat, but Kate leveled the gun at him with conviction and made him re-take it with a look.
Wyatt approached him, taking a small coil of rope from his pocket. “Give me your hands.”
“Why?”
“Just do it!”
“Do it!” Kate hissed at him with venom.
Kit offered his hands, joined at the wrist and Wyatt began to tie them. “You guys are fucking insane,” he accused. “It was a misunderstanding. I don’t deserve to be treated like this!”
“You deserve to be Canjo fodder.” Wyatt never looked up from his task. “Or left here. In fact, you didn’t want to try the sub-space flight. You shouldn’t even be here. We should have just left you behind in the first place.”
“Now, hang on!”
A thought occurred to Wyatt. “No! You hang on! What do you know?”
“About what?”
“About the mission? Its purpose?”
“What do you mean? You run the goddamn department, you tell me? What is this, some kind of joke?”
Wyatt looked into his eyes and found no lie there. Kit wasn’t in on the deception that Par had revealed to him. Satisfied, he pulled the knot tight until Kit winced. “That should do it. On your feet.”
Kit stood up, nearly overbalancing, having no arms to steady himself. Wyatt walked back to Kate to take back his weapon. He found it welded into her hands. “It’s okay. I’ll take it from here.”
She looked at him as if she didn’t trust him.
“I’ve got it,” he said.
Reluctantly she relinquished the gun.
* * * * *
They pressed on and when the forest thinned and they eventually broke from the trees, night had already descended and a wind had whipped up to add a chill to the already crisp air. The sky was mostly clear, save for a few tiny clouds that blighted it like smudges of gray ink on an otherwise black page. The temperature was falling fast and their breath condensed in vapory wisps.
After an hour traversing the plain they took a sharp turn and headed west, straight towards the mountain they had been flanking up until now. In the darkness it was a black silhouette on the skyline, but even from this dist
ance Wyatt thought it looked odd. It had no symmetry and if it had been created from a geological event then he had seen nothing like it. Apart from thinking it strange he paid it no more attention; it was good that they had a landmark to focus on. The idea of trudging across an otherwise featureless landscape as the cold took them in its icy grip did not appeal.
Wyatt knew that the alien would be as anxious as them to reach their goal. With the temperature falling, it would also do well to get out of the cold.
As the mountain loomed before them, Wyatt’s eyes began picking out manmade features in the darkness. “That’s it!” he cried over the sound of the wind.
Kate gave him a doubtful look, holding the peak of her cap against the gale. “Are you sure?”
He nodded. “Yes, that’s it. Come on.”
* * * * *
The ground crunched beneath their feet and they slipped numerous times due to the poor footing and their own fatigue. They were past caring, though. The jettisoned command module of the DSM towered above them, its nose buried in the side of the mountain. When they reached it, they all slumped against the side of the ship and sat on the chalky rock, heedless of the weather. Gon-Thok had got them here. They had made it.
* * * * *
Chris turned off the welding arc and lifted the visor off his face. It was hot work, and he wiped his brow as best he could with the back of a wrist before running a gloved finger over his work to check the quality. With Wyatt, Kate and Kit gone, and Bobby and Par on the mend, Chris found himself at rather a loose end. He’d decided that rather than sit around and do nothing, he’d make himself useful and try to at least strengthen some of the structural damage that the shuttle had incurred when it had collided with the tree. To this end he had started removing panels from the shuttle’s main deck and welding them to the ripple along the ship’s flank. The floor of the shuttle now resembled something like a checkerboard, with floor panels in places and exposed wires and guts of the ship elsewhere.
He rose and zigzagged his way through the ship, past Bobby and Par who sat and talked in whispers, and into the cockpit. There was one more available panel he could use.
As he passed the broken door he glanced up and out of the cockpit windows. Through the branches of the nearby trees he could see the pasty pink moon, like a pale heart crisscrossed with choking black arteries. He blinked and the single moon was replaced by two patches of purple, after-images of flame that the oxyacetylene torch had burnt onto his retina. He thought briefly of the others, somewhere out there in the night, sighed and set to work. He wished he were with them.
* * * * *
It took a fair amount of convincing to get Gon-Thok into the DSM but Wyatt didn’t want to shut it out in the storm. Not only did it seem unfair to him, but if he did that, then it would go to find water and shelter and then their guide would be lost to them. While they were jubilated at finally locating their target, none of them had forgotten that they were only half way there. They still needed to identify the parts that Chris had described and find their way back to the shuttle unharmed.
Wyatt closed the door behind the creature with some relief and savored the relative calm of the gloomy interior of the ship. He was pleased to see that Kate had already snapped one of her glow sticks. The green light illuminated the dark recesses of the corridor ahead with an eerie fluorescence.
He struggled past them in the cramped corridor, ludicrous given the size of the vessel, fishing in his pocket at the same time to find a glow stick of his own. Feeling it in his hand, he snapped it between two fingers and his thumb and brought the brightness out to help light the way.
The DSM’s were a mystery to all but those who flew and crewed them. Even this command module dwarfed all but the largest frigates and its guts were a maze of corridors, stairwells and lifts. Sometimes Wyatt thought he recognized parts of the ship from before, thought maybe they were backtracking or walking in circles, but then he’d turn into a new corridor and find himself in a whole other part of the massive ship’s bowels. Whenever he found a stairwell he headed upward.
The brightness dimmed and he turned to find Kate had stopped behind him. She held her glowstick by her side and her shoulders were slumped.
“What is it?”
“Where are we going? What is it we are looking for?” she asked, dejected.
“The MedLab.”
“Why?”
“Because it has its own generator. Its own power.”
“What good will that do us?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I thought you might like a little light. Maybe some hot water. There’ll be beds up there, too.”
“Oh,” she said. A smile brightened her features. That all sounded rather nice.
* * * * *
With the last panel removed, Chris slipped the hammer out of his belt and began to bang it into shape, molding it to match the side of the ship where it would finally be welded. He brought the hammer down with a clang and put a dent and a crimp in the panel. The second hit spread the crease even further across the silver surface. The third time Chris brought the hammer to bear the whole shuttle shook. For a second he looked at it in disbelief, spinning it round in his hand.
“Chris? Was that you?” Bobby called through to him. “What are you doing in there?”
“Nn…Nu…Nothing.” He blinked and saw again the two purple marks behind his eyelids. This was strange. Unnerving. He felt the rush of adrenaline rising inside him but he felt something else too, like he was being watched. Slowly, he turned back to the windows; there was a moon in each window now. Not pink like before. These were milky white orbs. That couldn’t be. This planet didn’t have two moons. Two suns, yes, but not two moons. He blinked again and saw the purple behind his eyelids but the white moons were still there afterwards.
He didn’t think it, just became consciously aware of the fact that the two balls of light outside were perfect. They were gleaming globes of white with no marks or imperfections. No branches crossed them, like they did the moon, which could only mean one thing. There were no branches in front of them, no branches between them and the window. They weren’t moons.
He felt the leg of his pants grow warm. He whimpered, partly in fear, partly in embarrassment from losing control of his bladder. “We’re in trouble, guys.”
“What kind of trouble?” Bobby called back.
“Big trouble.”
The white orbs swung away from the ship in unison, retreating a small distance before starting to swing back.
“Brace yourself!” Chris screamed.
* * * * *
Wyatt pulled the ropes tight around the base of the chair. Kit was now firmly tied into it. “How am I supposed to sleep like this?” he complained.
Wyatt stood up, looked at him and shrugged. “Dunno. You figure it out. Besides, do I look like someone who really cares?”
Kit’s eyes filled with hatred. “You bastard.” He struggled in the chair for a while and then gave up. The ropes held him fast. Wyatt gave him a look of vague pity before leaving him.
The MedLab was vast, not unexpected given the size of the ship, but Wyatt wondered why it was so big. This was a mining ship command module, after all. They were only mining. If they followed standard mining protocol, what could they do to themselves to warrant all this medical equipment? There was lots of it, he had to admit. This MedLab was far better equipped than any of the U.L.F. craft he had served upon or now commanded, and yet miners faced none of the dangers that a U.L.F. team encountered. Bites, trauma, poisons, unknown diseases. None of it. That was the price they paid for being government–funded. he guessed.
Nebula IV. One of a fleet owned by Nebula’s mining company. They probably had money to burn. Millions of credits to allocate where and as and when they felt like it. In a way the deep space mining companies had a monopoly on any precious stone or ore they found, as long as they found it first. Who else was going to spend weeks to get somewhere to mine a commodity that someone else had already claimed as
their own? They were laughing.
Wyatt looked around the Lab again. All this was just an extravagance, the best of everything, just to keep the workforce happy. The Government would rather let their workforce die. They’d rather have let him die, that was for sure. There were plenty more where he came from. Too many, in fact.
Kate walked past him, rubbing the back of her head with a towel. He looked her up and down. She was wearing dry clothes. Clean blue overall pants and a white T-shirt. He frowned. “Where’d you get those?”
“There’s a clothes store by the showers.”
“Well I’d better go get cleaned up too, I guess.” He looked at himself and scratched the back of his head.
“You can try,” Kate said. Wyatt looked at her questioningly. “Gon-Thok has found the hot water. It’s in its element. It’ll be in there for hours.”
* * * * *
The first hit sent Chris sprawling into the instrument console. He slid off it and into the hole in the floor he’d just created. Behind him he could hear Par yelling and see Bobby on the floor, her face a complex of questions.
“What the hell was that?” Par shouted.
Chris struggled to get out of the gap in the floor. Wires snaked around his legs like tentacles. “I don’t know what it is. It’s outside!” Just as he got free the second hit shook the shuttle.
“Jesus Christ!” Par screamed.
Chris scrambled through the door to where Bobby lay. “Are you okay?”
She nodded. “Yeah, just a little shaken.”
“We’re all that,” he tried with a smile. He looked up. The shuttle door, which had been slightly ajar to allow in a cool draught of fresh air, was now wide open, knocked aside with the force of the blows. “We’ve got to get that closed. Whatever it is, it’s big.”
He started for the door but before he even got halfway an enormous foot landed square outside. The impact tremor alone shook the ship.
