Andromeda Expedition

by Carlos Arroyo González

  Fox walked over and pointed to the image.

  “This, assuming it's a tooth, compared to this part of the RJN you see here, implies a size of at least thirty feet. And in proportion, the rest of the body could be hundreds of feet. Next to it the Titan is a rag doll. We shoudn't cross that ocean.”

  “Listen, I don't know what you've seen there, but we're not going to abort the mission because of a vague image in which I'm afraid you've seen only an optical effect caused by the effects of light on water. But in any case, I'm beginning to feel more than a little suspicious about your... mental stability, I'm afraid.”

  “What I fear is that the idea of all that money has blinded you, and you can no longer see even the most obvious things.”

  “Viper told us you were a tough guy. I' m surprised you' re so easily frightened by a trick of light and shadows.”

  The light from the halogen lamps reflected on the hairs of his mustache soaked in coffee and bourbon. He put down his mug and leisurely pulled out his notebook. He turned a couple of pages and scribbled something that Fox couldn't decipher. He wrote alternating with quick glances at Fox. Sometimes he would nod briefly before continuing, as if in support of his conclusions.

  “It's getting on my nerves,” Fox said.

  “Really? Tell me about it, Fox.”

  “I don't know what you're thinking, but I'm not your stupid patient, you know that? I assure you that I'm finding it hard to stop myself from breaking your face.”

  Edelmann picked up his scribbling and underlined a couple of things. He gave Fox a pacifying look.

  “Hey, take it easy. I'm just trying to help you, captain. So they kicked you out?”

  “I was no longer useful to them. A piece of old junk that was no longer worth a paycheck.”

  Edelmann wiped his mustache with the back of his hand and pursed his lips. As he did so, his beard rose slightly.

  “Why don't you believe me?”, Fox said.

  “I think all this has upset you more than it should have. I'll get you an anxiolytic.”

  “I don't need any stupid anxiolytics!” Fox stood up knocking over the table. Chess pieces flew everywhere. Mugs shattered.

  In the darkness of the bedroom, Fox's thoughts returned to that August day on the beaches of Bradley Falls, when he jumped off the water mat and returned to shore holding the paddles. He remembered the emptiness beneath his feet.

  Maybe Edelmann was right after all. Perhaps it was nothing more than his fears provoking a strong suggestibility. He took out the photo and looked at it under the flashlight. Yes, maybe. Maybe it was just reflections on the surface and the huge shadow of a dense, black cloud like a man's guilt.

  He opened his eyes. It was still night. And in Erebus that was like the night of the night. Through his bedroom window, he could barely see more than a faint silver glow in the spacecraft's surroundings: the ring formed by the Titan's exterior lights. A small oasis of light in a vast desert of darkness.

  “Nova.”

  “Yes, Fox.”

  “Do you think we'll make it back?”

  “Do you want me to give you an estimated probability based on the data I have?”

  “No, I guess not. What do you think is in the photo?”

  “I think whatever I say won't change anything. I think it's a useless curiosity.”

  Fox sat up and looked at her through the dim emergency light that illuminated the room. She was standing, leaning against the wall with her hands behind her back. He felt anger at the sight of that mark on her forehead, like an ancestral rune that prevented impossible dreams.

  Nova. She tasted the name. He felt how the two syllables slid over the roof of his mouth. A synthetic caress with the smell of raspberries and carbon fiber. A program, nothing more. Doom written with ones and zeros. Imperfections planned in an algorithm. Permutations of random seduction. Inaccessible, ghostly beauty. A meaningless desire. The trails of a perfect deception pressing the right keys in his brain. He forced himself not to think any more, although he couldn't, because what he really wanted was for that torture to never end.

  “I'm going to the Ulysses. Come with me.”

  “Yes, Fox.”

  He advanced down the corridor, almost gliding. Through the half-open doors of the dormitories of his companions, he saw that they were asleep. Outside, leaving the ring of light around the Titan, Fox switched on the flashlight. The ground was a thin layer of sand on rock. He couldn't stop his footsteps from crunching as if he were chewing corn nuts. Through the suit's air filter, the scent of the Erebus night reached him, a mixture of salt and loneliness. The wind murmured like an emissary bringing bad news. Sandstone pellets pelted his helmet visor with a fine clatter. In the light of the lantern, the shadows of the rocks oscillated in a demented, hypnotic dance, like a spell of the planet to rule the will of the one who dared to disturb its misty serenity. After advancing almost a mile through the darkness, the beam of his flashlight found the sharp silhouette of the Ulysses. A huge metal shark caught in its sleep.

  He entered the spacecraft and when the hatch closed behind him, he removed his helmet.

  When he kissed Nova, he was surprised by the warmth of her mouth.

  Ambition, like darkness, cannot be satisfied.

  First line from Silk Bullets, by Julian F. Malek

  Night loomed over the WilkinsBank Eastcountry Cabinet room. The halogen lamps hidden behind the friezes provided passive and unreal illumination. The remains of the ten family-size pizzas they had dined on were still on the table. The smell of cheese and pepperoni dominated that gallery of weary busts.

  Simmons was concentrating on trying to remove a tomato stain from a fingernail.

  “Mr. President,” Marta Weyland said. The makeup she had applied at six o'clock in the morning of that endless day was beginning to reveal the person hiding under the computer-generated persona. “With all due respect. The parasi... termens seem to have come with their whole damned army. Old Europa and the quori are being slaughtered. If we don't intervene, we'll all die, can't you see that?”

  “I don't tolerate that tone, Marta. If we get into the war now, our whole campaign will collapse.”

  “To hell with the campaign! Are you blind? Those bugs will exterminate us!”

  “What are you so afraid of, Marta?” Simmons smiled, “Don't you trust me anymore?”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “When Old Europa has been reduced to ashes, we'll never have to worry again. People will vote for us forever and ever.

  “Old Europa and the whole planet, dumbass!”

  Martha looked as if she would jump across the table at any moment and tear Simmons' neck with her pink fingernails. She looked at him as if she had suddenly realized that she had a madman in front of her.

  She looked at a piece of jalapeño that had been left dangling over the edge of one of the boxes. It was a breath away from falling. The air conditioner made it sway gently in his precarious grip. Marta pulled out her gun and pointed it at the president. Simmons, in turn, pointed his gun at her. He waved a denial gesture at the security bouncers already bursting into the room in a stampede of leather boots.

  “I understand how you feel, Marta. But I won't let anyone or anything stand in my way. You have to trust me, for your sake and for the sake of this country.”

  “I think it's pretty clear. You should be locked up in a mental institution, you need help,” Marta's hand was shaking.

  “You have been a faithful assistant to this country and to your government, always. We wouldn't have been able to get to where we are if it hadn't been for your help.”

  “How far are we? And where are we? Surrounded by hell-spitted creatures who will ravage us and use our bones to clean their teeth?”

  The jalapeño seemed to hang on the last molecule of its wrinkled skin.

  “You don't understand our mission,” Simmons said calmly. “We have a mission to lift these poor people out of their misery. If we give up now
, what hope will be left for the world?”

  When the jalapeño was unhooked, before it could touch the white methacrylate of the table Marta and Simmons fired. Two almost simultaneous flashes added their thunder to the psychotropic concert produced by the smell of cheese and the cloying perfume of Marta, who fell face first onto her papers.

  It is difficult to know the exact purpose of the luminous band that outlines the exoskeleton of termens. Although it is possible that it is only part of a simplified communication system, I have found certain similarities with a species of shark that, while traversing the abyssal darkness, illuminates a part of its abdomen. This is how it attracts its prey.

  Volpenier, Compendium of Exobiology

  In his bedroom, Fox was going through the documentation of the Albatross Expedition. A pile of papers, files and photographs on which he had placed a mug of coffee. On the red porcelain of the mug was depicted Isaac's emblem in white ink. On the other side of the narrow window that stretched along the top of the wall was the darkness of that planet, a wasteland composed mostly of water, except for that small raft of parched earth blackened by its own ennui.

  He looked up at the black sky of Erebus and imagined Emily somewhere millions of light years away, surely still unaware of what was looming over Earth. Perhaps at that moment she was playing with that little house he had given her on her fourth birthday (the last one he had been able to enjoy with her. He still remembered that lipstick that, despite Jessica's protests, she had insisted on wearing, and she spent half the party with her lips smeared with it), in which she put all her dolls, so that they would live there, even if she had to force them in. It was possible that rumblings had begun to be heard in the sky. Surely Jessica would have just explained to her that it was a magical storm or something. She would hide the truth from her until there was no other choice. And then what? He imagined Emily, a little person not yet up to his waist, staring with eyes full of innocence and terror at those monsters. Looking at her mother for an explanation that would never come.

  He swallowed the tears that threatened to spill.

  “I hope I'm not disturbing.”

  Fox turned around. Dr. Edelmann was watching him from the doorway. His white coat (Fox had no idea why he wore it everywhere) was stained. He caught a whiff of bourbon.

  “Can't you knock?”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Get out of here.”

  “I just wanted you to know that we're getting ready to leave for the Great Ocean. We leave in a couple of hours.”

  Before closing the door, Edelmann's eyes crept over Fox's face for a moment, probing, scrutinizing like tentacles reaching out from between the rocks in the ocean depths.

  The wind whistled by the glass, and the hissing rose and fell, tracing a precise parabola that was drawn across the ceiling in thick red strokes. Wide at the beginning and narrower at the end, ending in a delicate point, as if they were being shaped with a large brush. The white circles that furrowed those waves calmed him. Slow on the ups, fast on the downs. Old familiar faces appeared in the circles. Mr. Yun. Viper. Then instead of a white circle came the black skull Jessica had tattooed on her back. It rose above the red waves and exploded with a soft POP. And from it fell Emily rocking like a leaf. Fox embraced her. But before long Emily's warm little body had turned into sharp bumps and prickly joints. He felt around and found that he was hugging a metal-hard shell covered in jagged relief. He retreated a couple of steps and what he saw was one of those parasites with its mouth full of teeth, drooling a whitish substance to the ground. All around him, buildings reduced to rubble, split columns and beams revealing the wires inside, like hanging arteries. The wind dragging clouds of dust through the desolate streets, swaying among the mountains of corpses, while little by little the screams fade away, until only the sigh of the wind and the creaking of the footsteps of those beings moving among the destruction remain. Cut against the gray sky, columns of black smoke rising in languid spirals, like the black mist of Erebus, and the sky, gradually turning from the mauve of the sunset to an absolute black like the emptiness of space.

  “Why did you leave me alone, Daddy?”

  You can't imagine it.

  Advertising for the first intergalactic tourist trip, Star Project Corporation.

  The day had dawned clear, even the blackish haze seemed to have largely dissolved, so that the sky was a huge crimson lake crisscrossed by faint dark streams. Rocks covered with a kind of deep orange vine blocked the way, and there was no way around. Isaac stopped the spacecraft. He lifted the small lever next to his right knee. Through the dust-covered windows they watched as ten jointed limbs unfolded with an electric whirring sound. When they reached the ground they continued to apply force, so that the vehicle rose a few feet above the barren surface. Isaac inserted the power plunger of the TPA system (that's what it read next to the plunger, in shaky calligraphy. Fox wondered if those acronyms meant something, and concluded that they were probably nothing more than a grandiloquent way of referring to what Isaac in his head would have filed away as “centipede mode” or something similar, another mask with which to reassure potential crewmembers) halfway down its length. The Titan's legs began to move, and the vehicle moved forward with a gentle sway. Fox felt as if he were inside a huge armored arthropod.

  As they reached the first major obstacle, a rock formation more than thirty feet high, the TPA system emitted the TPA system emitted a hoarse beep. The Titan's metallic legs climbed up, clinging to the rock with their sharp ends, like a giant deformed centipede. As it ascended, the body of that artificial arthropod arched, adapting itself to the shape of the obstacle. If only it were as easy as it was for that irrational artifact, Fox thought, to ride over the memories and continue onward, leaving all that behind, like forgotten obstacles on the road. Activate the neural sequence that would make his mind climb and continue without looking back.

  After overcoming that sector, Isaac retracted the TPA system and gave full power.

  There were problems with the air conditioning system, and inside the cockpit it was sweltering hot. However, Dr. Edelmann had not taken off his white coat. He was going over the ocean plans, scattered on his lap. Every time the Titan gave a bounce, he readjusted his glasses on the bridge of his nose. Isaac stared straight ahead without blinking, his jaw clenched in a proud smile.

  Fox recalled the excitement he felt as a child, when on the last leg of the journey he knew that at any moment the sea line would appear. Although in this case it was imbued with a very different feeling. As if tentacles were squeezing his chest, preventing him from breathing.

  Fox stared out the common room window at the wasteland startled by Pharex's light. Plains of dark earth from which rose gigantic protuberances like obelisks dedicated to pagan deities, and between the cracks that dotted those rocks, wisps of black smoke were born, although one could imagine that it was not smoke of any kind, but pure darkness that was born in the bowels of the planet and ascended to the surface in order to take over everything. Strange was the occasion when during the night he managed to see a star between the permanent clouds of Erebus, which, like a dirty veil, barely let the light of Pharex shine through.

  “Shouldn't you be doing your job?” Nova said, entering the common room, tossing Fox a pen.

  “Shut up, you tin pile. I do enough making sure you don't get into trouble.”

  Nova let out a cruel laugh.

  “I'm going to tell them right now that you're not doing anything.”

  “Want me to disconnect you forever?”

  “Sure, like you'd dare.”

  Fox grabbed her and sat her on his lap. He silenced her as best he knew how.

  “You look busy, sorry to disturb,” Edelmann said from the doorway. Fox just gave him a neutral look. “I need a little test.”

  He waved a plastic tube, pressing his lips together in a thin line that joined his beard into a single, carded blond mass.

  “Won't it be complicated with the
rattling of the vehicle?”

  “Don't worry, it'll just be a little prick on the finger.”

  Fox held out his hand.

  “It's amazing, this technology, isn't it?” Edelmann said, removing the plastic tube from its plastic sleeve. “When I was a kid, a vehicle like this was only imaginable in a science fiction movie. And let's not even talk about robots, so real that you could almost mistake them for human beings.”

  “Do you have something against me, Dr. Edelmann?”

  “I'm sorry you think so. I'm just trying to do my job to the best I can. Okay, just a second,” he took Fox's index finger and made a pinprick with a small device. He let a drop drip into the vial and closed it. “That's it. By the way, I thought I saw you outside the spacecraft last night. I mean, in the wee hours of the morning.”

  “Perhaps we need a doctor for our doctor after all, don't you think?”

  “And you had the android with you. Any urgent midnight operations?”

  “I left something forgotten on the Ulysses. You have your sample.”

  On a sticker, Edelmann wrote “Capt. Fox Stockton” and stuck it on the tube.

  “I think this place is getting to you,” he said. “You've been getting more and more aggressive since we've been here.”

  “But only with you, in case you hadn't noticed.”

  “I see. What about the little... incident the other night? You knocked over the table and started screaming like a madman. I was afraid for the integrity of the crew.”

  “I feel that if you don't get out of here right now I'm going to break this bottle over your head. What do you say about that?”

  Dr. Edelmann again made that gesture in which he joined his beard into a single mass of hair. He took out a notebook, looked at the clock and wrote something down. The reflection of the halogens in the lenses of his glasses hid his eyes in the process.

  “Well, that's all, Mr. Stockton.”