MY SWEET SATAN
Peter Cawdron
thinkingscifi.wordpress.com
Copyright © Peter Cawdron 2014
All rights reserved
The right of Peter Cawdron to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published as an eBook by Peter Cawdron using Kindle Digital Publishing
All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental
Synopsis
The crew of the Copernicus are sent to investigate Bestla, one of the remote moons of Saturn. Bestla has always been an oddball, orbiting Saturn in the wrong direction and at a distance of thirty million kilometers, so far away that Saturn appears smaller than Earth's moon in the night sky. Bestla hides a secret. When mapped by an unmanned probe, Bestla awoke and began transmitting a message, only it’s a message no one wants to hear: “I want to live and die for you, Satan.”
Chapter 01: Awake
Sunlight flickered through the leaves of the old oak tree. A cool breeze broke the sweltering heat of the day. Clouds drifted high in the stratosphere, lit up by the setting sun in hues of pink, red and yellow. Jasmine rocked in a swinging chair suspended from the porch of her home in Atlanta, Georgia, enjoying the quiet of the coming evening.
“NASA Live is on,” came a call from inside the house. “They're talking about the Magellan mission to Enceladus.”
“I'll pass,” Jasmine replied, kicking gently with her feet and swaying back and forth in the wooden seat. Above her, a chain squeaked gently, keeping time with her motion. The smell of freshly baked apple pie wafted through the air, but Jasmine knew there was no sense in asking her mother for a slice until after supper.
Jasmine keyed a text into her cellphone, her thumbs racing through a message to her boyfriend, Mike.
Your late.
She glanced down at the message she'd sent and realized there was a typo. Most people wouldn't care, but Jasmine was a perfectionist. Her fingers madly typed a second message.
You're - not your. Fat fingers.
No sooner had she hit send on the second message than her phone showed three dots revealing a reply was being typed in real time.
You have beautiful fingers.
Jasmine grinned at the message on her phone. Her fingers glanced over the glass screen as she sent a reply.
Beautiful fat pudgy fingers.
There was no response. A few seconds passed and she already regretted the speed with which she'd hit the send button, but there was no taking back any of her messages. Why had she said fat? And why had she then reinforced the notion in her second message? She hesitated, wanting to send something to retract her comments, only she knew she'd make her gaffe worse. That Mike hadn't responded a second time was telling. He was too kind to scold her.
Jasmine was nineteen and had been accepted into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with academic scores that were already grabbing the attention of Charles Draper, the NASA liaison officer at MIT. She had a dream. Like Mike, she wanted to be an astronaut and wasn’t shy in making her ambition known. Mike had made it into MIT two years earlier and was already participating in some of NASA’s preliminary training courses.
Fat! Jasmine had never been fat. And what was wrong with a bit of soft padding? Fat was natural for women. Besides, she'd never been fitter in her life, running a seven minute mile three times a week, and yet she still obsessed over her body image. Jasmine disappointed herself. She couldn't leave the conversation there. She had to say something to defuse the tension she felt weighing down upon her.
Joke.
Some joke, she thought, sitting there gripping her phone, willing Mike to reply. Seconds seemed like hours. Maybe he was driving. He was coming over for a birthday dinner with her folks, and he was late. It was entirely likely he was driving, but then how had he responded to her first message? Argh, Jasmine thought. Don't overthink things, girl. You're making this worse.
Her phone chimed softly with an incoming message.
:)
And she did smile. Funny, she thought, how two punctuation marks from Mike could set her mind at ease.
Not driving, right?
OK, she thought, now you're borderline obsessive. Leave the poor guy alone.
No, Mom. Matt's dropping me off.
Mom! Urgh. Mike was right, though, she sounded just like his mother. Jasmine sat there wondering just how such a small series of messages had thrown her off kilter so badly, leaving her feeling green. Why did she refer to a simple typo as the result of fat fingers? She should have let it be. From there, she'd plunged into a spiral dive out of the clouds. Jasmine felt like a wheel out of balance, shaking on its axle. If she was going to make it into the astronaut corps, she was going to have to stow this shit, she decided.
Her father waved as he walked along the footpath beyond their white picket fence. Jasmine dropped her phone into her lap and waved back.
The grass was lush and green. Underground sprinklers came on, automatically popping up and spraying a light mist over the lawn. Fine droplets of water moved in a gentle arc that reached up no more than a foot or so in height. In some places, the spray soaked the concrete sidewalk leading to the house.
A bicycle lay on the grass getting wet—her older brother had a habit of being too lazy to take his bike around the side of the house, and that bugged her. One of these days that bike would be stolen, she thought. Maybe she should hide it and give him a scare. She wondered if that would work. Probably not.
“Hey, Jazz,” her father called out, opening the low wooden gate and walking up the path. “Good to see you made it home for a few days.”
“Hi, Dad,” she replied cheerfully. “Good to see you, too.”
Her father was dressed in a business suit but he was carrying both his jacket and his tie draped over one arm. Sweat soaked through his white shirt. Perspiration dripped from his brow.
“No air con, huh?” Jasmine said, picking up her phone and hitting send on another text to her boyfriend as she spoke to her Dad. She hadn't said anything to Mike, responding only with smiley face in response to his. She had finally decided to stop acting like a teenager. Time to grow up, she thought.
“Nope,” Dad replied, taking the stairs two at a time as he jogged up onto the porch. “Let me guess, Mom's fussing around in the kitchen?”
“Something like that,” Jasmine replied.
Her father came up to her. He leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. To her surprise, a spark of static electricity jumped between them, something that shouldn't have happened on a sweltering, humid, hot and sticky summer day.
~
Jasmine blinked. But in that fleeting moment as her eyelids closed and opened again, her world transformed. White lights burned into her eyes. Pain surged through her chest, tearing across her pectoral muscles. Her back arched as her body tensed, flexing and convulsing involuntarily.
“STAY WITH ME, JAZZ!”
Jasmine's mouth was open, but she couldn't speak. She gasped, trying to scream but her cry came out as little more than an agonized moan. Every nerve in her body tingled. Her muscles clenched. She choked, unable to breathe.
“Are you declaring a medical emergency?” a distinctly calm voice asked.
“Fuck you, Jason!” cried a middle-aged man. His face was vaguely familiar, hidden behind a full beard, obscuring his cheeks, mouth and chin. The matted tangle of straggly, unkempt whiskers made his face look enlarged. Through the haze of pain, all Jasmine could think was that the hair on his head looked incongruous. How could such long, wild hair be reconciled with a receding hairline that reached so high upon his brow? It was as
though he were both young and old, a contradiction, both a hippie and a conservative.
The man shook Jasmine, grabbing her by her shoulders. Garage mechanic? Paramedic? Jasmine struggled to make sense of his blue jumpsuit through the surge of pain.
“Damn it, Jazz. Not like this!”
Jasmine could barely focus her eyes. The edge of her vision blurred, the lights were blinding, but the name embroidered on the jumpsuit was clear: Mike Morrison.
Mike?
Her Mike?
Impossible.
She couldn't concentrate. Every muscle in her body ached. She wanted to scream, but she couldn't. The cool air brushing past her lips teased her with the promise of relief, but her chest wouldn't expand. She couldn't breathe. She was suffocating. It felt as though someone had stretched a plastic bag over her head, pulling it tight across her mouth and cutting off her airflow, and yet she could feel the soft touch of a breeze on her cheeks.
Mike grabbed at the straps of her cotton tank-top. With a surge of raw, animal aggression, he tore her shirt open. His muscular arms ripped the flimsy material from her chest. Mike was yelling, swearing, but to Jasmine he had an almost dreamlike, fluid motion to his movements. For a second, she thought they were underwater, but she could hear him, she could feel the breeze on her cheek.
Mike slapped two sticky patches on her, one on her upper right chest, the other directly on her left breast.
“Give me charge,” he yelled.
“You're not clear,” the calm voice replied. “She has to be properly restrained.”
“Just do it!” Mike screamed. “She's dying.”
~
Jasmine blinked and the pain disappeared. She was still sitting on the wooden swing rocking gently back and forth. The screen door leading into the rickety old house slammed shut behind her father. Birds flittered in the old oak tree. Streams of sunlight broke through the leaves.
“Ah,” she said absentmindedly, wanting to say something to someone, but there was no one there. A police car drove down the road, cruising by slowly. The officer had his elbow resting on the open window, enjoying the breeze. To Jasmine, it seemed as though he didn't have a care in the world, and on such a beautiful evening, why should he?
Jasmine looked down at her phone as the casing shook with an incoming message. She picked it up, surprised to find it felt as light as a feather.
Stay with me, Jazz.
The shock of seeing those words hit her like a jolt of electricity. Her muscles spasmed and she released her grip on it. The phone drifted from her hand, floating effortlessly in front of her instead of falling back into her lap. She watched in astonishment as her phone twisted slowly, drifting gently to one side, suspended in mid-air.
Jasmine turned her head in panic. Strands of her own hair floated effortlessly before her, mimicking her motion, free from the shackles of gravity.
The red bicycle drifted beside the picket fence, no longer touching the grass. The sprinklers no longer sprayed in an arc. Water fell upward, like rain being recalled to heaven.
The branches of the old oak normally sagged under the weight of age, but today they looked spritely. The leaves were crisp, no longer dipping as they pointed at the ground.
The police cruiser sailed above the cars parked on the side of the road, twisting as its momentum carried it onward. The officer didn't look bothered by what he was seeing. His arm still rested on the windowsill of the cruiser and he played lazily with the steering wheel.
Jasmine felt herself lift off her seat. She grabbed at the wooden slats, trying to hold herself down, but the chains that held her seat in place no longer pulled taut under gravity. Galvanized steel links of chain drifted lazily beside her, clinking softly. Her phone rotated through 360 degrees slowly revealing the text message again. The words looked innocuous, but the message terrified her.
Stay with me, Jazz.
“Dad?” she called out. “Mom? Mike? Anyone?”
Fear seized her and again, she blinked.
~
The bearded mechanic slammed Jasmine’s body against the wall. Her head snapped back, striking a hard, plastic surface. Pain surged through her body.
Velcro ripped open. Her arms were thrust out to either side and hastily strapped in place. There was a hiss of oxygen from the plastic mask pushed roughly over her mouth and nose. Mike held the mask in place, only to hold the mask still he had to anchor himself with his other arm, holding on to a rail on the bulkhead so he didn’t drift away.
“Please, Jazz. Don’t leave me. Stay with me.”
Jasmine closed her eyes. She wanted to return to her porch swing. She was choking, desperate to breathe. She wanted to escape the pain, only with her eyes closed the world seemed to swirl uncontrollably around her. She was plunging headlong into the darkness. She felt as though she'd been hit by a wave at the beach and knocked off her feet, was being tossed in the surf, tumbling beneath the waves.
“Clear,” the man's voice yelled, and she felt the oxygen mask come loose and drift across the bridge of her nose.
A jolt of pain ripped through her chest. Again, her back arched violently and she found herself raised up on her shoulder blades. Every muscle flexed as fifteen hundred volts tore through the fibers of her body. Jasmine couldn't help but open her eyes. The stranger in the jumpsuit floated in front of her just as the red bicycle and police cruiser had.
“Come on, baby,” he said, pushing the transparent oxygen mask back in place. He fought with the elastic strap, pulling it awkwardly over her head. Strands of hair caught in a metal clip and were torn painfully from her scalp.
Jasmine couldn't breathe. She could hear the hiss of oxygen flowing and feel the cool gas blowing against her face, but she couldn't draw a breath. She was drowning without being in water. Her lungs wouldn't respond.
“Again!”
Fire tore through her body. Jasmine felt as though someone had struck her across the chest with a baseball bat. Her stomach muscles clenched, seizing and spasming. She gagged. She vomited, clogging the oxygen mask. Mike grabbed at the mask, snapping the elastic as he wrestled the plastic cone to one side.
Jasmine couldn't help herself. Spew projected out of her mouth, but instead of falling at her feet the dark green bile sailed across the white room, missing Mike the mechanic but striking the far cabinet and spraying outward. Tiny drops of vomit floated inches from her eyes.
Finally, Jasmine gasped, sucking in a lungful of air.
“That's it. Breathe, baby. Breathe.”
With a damp towel, Mike wiped her face, pushing back her hair and gently cleaning the corners of her mouth. The oxygen mask drifted away, hissing and spraying fine droplets of bile through the air.
“Stay with me, OK?”
~
“OK?” her father said, repeating a word she'd heard moments before in what seemed like another lifetime.
Jasmine blinked several times, if only to reassure herself of reality. The smell of freshly baked apple pie still filled the air. She could hear her mother humming a tune as she set the table. Knives and forks clinked softly as they were laid on the table behind her. The television was on. A muffled voice spoke of rockets and planets, transfer orbits and course corrections.
The setting sun lit up the clouds in ruddy hues. The sky grew darker. Venus appeared as a bright star in the twilight.
“Jazz?” her father said.
She looked around, confused. The bike lay still on the grass. The sprinklers soaked the lawn. At the far end of the street, the police cruiser indicated before turning at a four-way stop sign. The patrol car accelerated slowly and disappeared behind the weather-board covered homes. A bird chased a moth as it danced through the air, fluttering erratically, trying to reach the sanctuary of a low hedge.
“You were yelling out here,” her father added, the concern showing in his voice. “Are you OK?”
He crouched down in front of her, moving down to her level and looking her in the eye. The wrinkles on his forehead, the
grey hair on his head, and the warmth of his smile were comforting, grounding her in the moment. This was the same smile that had stared down at her in her crib, it was the same smile that had beamed at her during junior high graduation, the same smile that greeted her on return from summer camp. Jasmine felt as though nothing could hurt her in that moment. Her father's smile was an anchor.
“Is everything all right?” he asked, with a soft, deep voice that soothed her soul.
“I—I don't know,” she said, unsure what else to say. With one hand, she pushed her hair back behind her ear. Moments before, her hair had been swirling wildly before her, or had it?
Her daydream had seemed so real. The pain she'd felt had been overwhelming. Jasmine glanced down at her chest, half expecting to see patches and wires stemming from her naked torso, but her T-shirt looked ordinary, just a plain white cotton shirt with the image of some generic rock band printed in two-tone. Jasmine didn't even know who the band was. She'd bought the shirt because she thought it looked hip. The image was probably staged just for the T-shirt, but seconds ago she'd had a tank-top torn from her chest, not a T-shirt.
Her phone lay on the wooden deck by her feet. A fresh crack ran through the glass, cutting across the lower half of the screen.
“You dropped your phone,” her father said, reaching down and picking it up for her. “It's broken, but don't you worry about that. We can get it fixed.”
The message on the shattered screen still read: Stay with me, Jazz.
“Dad!” Jasmine cried, seizing his arm. “Please, don’t leave me.”
“Everything's going to be all right,” her father replied. “Just breathe, baby. Breathe.”
“No!” Jasmine called out. The hair on the back of her arms raised in horror. Her eyes were wide with terror. “No, please don't go. Don't send me back. I don't want to go there. I want to stay here with you and Mom.”
“You've got to be strong,” her father replied and already Jasmine could feel herself slipping away. She gripped his arm, wanting to convince herself the wrinkles in his sweat-soaked cotton shirt were real, but her fingers felt numb.
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