Andromeda Expedition

by Carlos Arroyo González

  He took the camera to the automatic developer, without bothering to take off his uniform. He looked with pleasure at the fruitful result of his session. In fact, it gave him goosebumps. When he looked up from those photographs and remembered reality, he felt it grip his neck and squeeze until he could barely breathe. He cried until the first light of dawn.

  In the solitude of the presidential residence, Simmons trashed the photo studio.

  The fairies returned and made the wolves dance.

  Martin S. Puncel, The Fairy Forest

  In the dream, which seemed much more vivid, almost a vision perhaps because he was dreaming it inside that Leviathan created by the wells of his mind, he saw Emily running through the halls of the school. The parasites were reaping human flesh like a farmer harvesting a crop. The whole picture was taken up by the screeching, the blood, and those horrors moving on jointed legs reminiscent of an arthropod's, and scrutinizing everything with the dark hollows of their faces.

  He could see some glimpses of the children's drawings that adorned the walls of the corridor. Chaotic children's drawings, with cheerful colors, that seemed to represent those bugs, and underneath phrases in heterogeneous capital letters, that said things like THEY ARE OUR FRIENDS, FREEDOM FOR THE SPACE CASTAWAYS or WELCOME HOME. A trickle of blood spread over a drawing showing one of those creatures with a sad face while some soldiers were mowing him down. Underneath it read: LEAVE THEM ALONE. That was the last image he saw of that place. He preferred not to dig any further. He preferred not to see who that blood belonged to.

  For months, Fox had been buying a ticket every Friday for the weekly drawing for a trip for two to the spas of the planet Virgil. It was one of the few things that kept his excitement going. From the time he bought the ticket until the drawing took place, he dreamed that maybe that was the one that was going to give him the one-way ticket to Virgil. He had told Bruce that if he ever won he would go with him.

  On that winter day that now seemed so far away, Fox was reading a rain-soaked magazine he had found on the front porch. It talked about the quantum leap improvements in the new New West aircraft. At seven-thirty he turned on the television and tuned in to the local network, with its white flower logo swirling in one corner of the holoimage. The anchorwoman, a blonde who it seemed to Fox had implanted eyes, pulled out the five symbols on that week's winning ticket. Coin, cherry, sun, sun, cherry. Fox dropped the coffee cup and paced around the room, holding the winning ticket as if at any moment a pair of wings might appear on it.

  It had been several months since Jessica had left him. For a couple of weeks now Fox had been talking to Valentina, the waitress at Stefano's who had made him that blueberry dessert, and they even had coffee a couple of times. He hadn't wanted to invite her to see that shabby, miserable dump, so they had gone to Vienna Cafe, even though that had meant leaving a good chunk of his savings for emergencies. He had no idea what he would do when she found out about his financial situation, but one thing at a time.

  With the winning ticket in his hands, he imagined Tina's face if he invited her on that trip. That would be final. He felt a little bad for Bruce, but he didn't have to know about it. Besides, he didn't even seem that excited. It was Friday, so Bruce would show up shortly. They would play chess and drink cheap bourbon.

  “They said tonight was going to be the coldest night of the winter,” Bruce said as he set up the white pieces.

  “No wonder. Do you intend to play anything other than the London System today? Last week I got tired of it.”

  “Of course I'll play it again. And it's not that you get tired. It's called having no idea how to play. Why would I change?”

  The opening went quietly, the two of them calmly deploying their armies, moving each piece to a square where it could be of use. Then Fox sacrificed his bishop to open the white castling. Bruce looked puzzled.

  “I think that's the first time I've seen you do something like that. And what's with the smile?”

  “It's just that I think I'm going to beat you this time.”

  They continued, and Fox soon reached an advantageous position, in which the white king was surrounded by the queen and a knight of the black army.

  “I'll let you assume the inevitable while I go to drain the lizard.”

  In the toilet, while thinking about the trip, he put his hand in his pocket and found that the ticket was gone.

  Fox returned without having dropped a drop.

  Bruce looked at the ticket. When Fox appeared he held it out to him. Then he looked at the cat-shaped clock on the wall.

  “It's almost nine o'clock. How was the draw?”

  Fox stared at him in silence, not knowing what to answer. Dozens of answers came simultaneously, struggling to get out.

  “I didn't watch it.”

  “But it's what you always look forward to every week, I'm sure you have several alarms and everything, you're obsessed.”

  “Yes, but today I had to go out.”

  “How come?”

  “I get the impression you're trying to divert the evening's attention away from what really matters,” he shot an accusing glance at Bruce's king.

  “And what was so important? It's been a while since you've had, shall we say, much to do.”

  “What are you implying?”

  “I'm saying that since your breakup you've gotten a little sloppy. It seems like you've... given up or something. This place, for instance...” he looked around, wrinkling his nose slightly.

  “Are you calling me a pig?” Fox started peeling an apple, feeling he needed to keep his hands busy.

  “You don't seem to have much interest in getting ahead. But yes, since you say so, this place does look like a stable.

  “I think you'd better leave,” his hands were shaking.

  “You'll never get out of this hole.”

  “You know?” Fox said, his mouth full from his first bite of apple, “I did see the damn lottery. You were right. I've been on time like clockwork.”

  “You've got a problem. You always have.”

  Like a spring, Fox's hand, still holding the little knife with the faded gold logo, lunged toward Bruce's neck. Blood dripped in fine threads like strands of honey, which stained the flowered shirt, and splattered the white nylon of the sofa.

  At the bottom of the hole, Fox opened his eyes through a haze of pain. As he tried to move, the first thing he noticed was a sharp twinge in his side. He felt his side and remembered that the knife was still stuck there. He reached for his belt but could not find the flashlight. With the limited visibility that the lights of the helmet allowed him, he saw that he was lying on what seemed to be layer upon layer of melted wax.

  What balance could he make of his existence? He sank into the abyss of meaninglessness that had been his life, his thoughts paced by the monster's heartbeat and the beeping of the oxygen system announcing that the reserve was about to run out.

  Fox began to crawl through the darkness. Every inch was an accomplishment. The violet light from the helmet's LEDs reflected off those amorphous amoebas of melted black plastic that made up the floor. He reached the wall after what seemed to him like miles of grueling progress. And he walked along it, feeling the rough, blackened surface. But he found nothing. So he turned off the light of his helmet and was plunged into absolute darkness. After a few seconds in which he let his eyes get used to the blackness, he began to see a less dark darkness, not too far away.

  The absolute darkness in which he found himself allowed him to distinguish the pale spot that looked like a ghost. He felt that that area was softer than the rest, but no matter how hard he squeezed or tried to tear it, it wouldn't budge. So he knew what he had to do.

  He grabbed the handle of the knife.

  He took a breath and without further delay, he pulled with his remaining strength. The knife came out with a snap. The pain was excruciating, although not as terrible as he had expected. He plunged the knife into the monster's flesh and tore downward. The le
viathan roared and flailed wildly. The heart thundered, very close. Fox held tightly to the knife, still stuck in the flesh, like a mountaineer clinging to an ice axe during a gale. When the monster calmed down, Fox stepped through the narrow opening. As he passed through to the other side, he realized that what was in front of him could only be the monster's heart.

  We trust you.

  WilkinsBank slogan

  The battle was lost. The only thing left to do was to gain time before the inevitable. At that moment, a hundred new parasite assault spacecrafts emerged. Their orange lights materializing on the dark screen of the universe, like a swarm of lurking eyes.

  Friedrick Olson recalled the images he had seen in a documentary about the close combat techniques of the parasites, which they used when assaulting enemy spacecrafts. Techniques that encompassed such subtleties as massive dismemberment and tearing. He froze. It seemed to him that someone was shouting something, an order perhaps, but he couldn't hear it.

  General Amiens was bellowing out orders. Until little by little he joined the general silence. They all awaited the end that sooner or later was to come.

  The presidential spacecraft of WilkinsBank Eastcountry, a gigantic mass so full of sponsors' logos that it was impossible to know its original color, rose from the Earth's atmosphere. It was a state-of-the-art armored Cytrus model, with enough firepower to destroy an asteroid the size of Beijing. It also had a photonic shield more than one mile in diameter. The spacecraft passed through the ranks of Old Europa and stopped in front of the parasite reinforcement squadron.

  It charged the shield and began to spit all its fire at the parasites, who in turn launched all their artillery, a hodgepodge reconstructed from dozens of plundered civilizations across the universe. The shield, on whose surface stood out the emblem of WilkinsBank, supreme sponsor of Eastcountry and dispenser of justice, flickered under the overwhelming firepower that loomed over it. Yet it was still holding.

  In the rear, the Old Europa fleet was able to reorganize, reload its shields and take a fresh look at the whole thing.

  The parasites rushed against the one gigantic ship that faced them so insolently, without ceasing to riddle it under their heterogeneous fire. The parasite spacecrafts surrounded the presidential spaceship, firing at point-blank range. The presidential ship disintegrated several of those spacecrafts. The shield finally gave way, but the parasites were not willing to destroy that juicy piece of human technology. Dozens of boarding spacecrafts emerged from the belly of one of the motherspaceships and swooped down on the presidential spacecraft, tiny targets, unreachable by the thick fire of the Cytrus.

  Simmons and Jameson released the gunnery controls. They stood in the center of the command room, back to back, Simmons in a costume of Gabriel Harrisman, space explorer, and Jameson in his gardener's coveralls still caked with mud, aiming their guns at the entrance doors. Through the corridors of the spacecraft came a rising rumble of harsh footsteps and bellowing. A flood of hatred crawled through the bowels of the spacecraft, searching for its heart.

  As the wolves drowned in the black waters of the river, some of them still danced. The fairies handed him the Crimson Sword. Only if he freed them from the Braconte would they let him leave their forest.

  Martin S. Puncel, The Fairy Forest

  Fox was in a cavity whose dimensions he could not fully grasp. In the center, a gigantic black amorphous mass pulsed with a dirty luminescence. Its deformed structure was delineated by thick appendages intertwined in no apparent order, among which a conglomerate of debris of all kinds was caked. Upon closer inspection, he realized that all these objects seemed familiar to him. They all seemed to have been snatched from some dark corner of his past. That entity had something similar to a head, an appendage that ended in a bulging end where a huge mouth showed a row of teeth that were lost in the darkness on the other side. Its abdomen pulsed, and with each beat, a black substance moved through the hundreds of ducts that surrounded it. On the vast surface of its back, hundreds of arachnoids and other creatures that Fox could not recognize, were coming towards the heart with more junk from all corners of the leviathan, and adding it to that nightmarish mass. Among them he saw the one carrying the neural catalyst. At that moment it was climbing up the side of the heart and leaving its load in a tangle of junk and appendages on the being's back.

  Fox turned off the helmet light and crawled toward the heart.

  He climbed, holding his breath and pain so as not to be detected by the arachnoids, clinging to his memories.

  As he reached the top something knocked him down from behind. Immediately he saw that the one writhing above him was Edelmann/Bruce. Below them the heart was pounding furiously.

  Fox pulled the knife from his belt. And he saw precisely where he was to plunge it. His hand wanted to fly there. His heart thundered behind his back with a deafening pumping.

  In Fox's mind there was only room for the man's death. BUMP-BUMP, BUMP-BUMP. Edelmann/Bruce was strangling him and staring at him with visceral hatred.

  At the edge of his field of vision he saw the catalyst, half buried between a racket and Emily's squirrel pajamas. He reached out and was only able to brush it with his fingertips.

  Brave goes to danger as stars grow on silver horizon. You don't forget.

  He reached into his pocket, pulled out the lucky chestnut and forced it into Edelmann/Bruce's maw. And in a whisper he said to him:

  “The highest mountain does not always hide the sunset.”

  For an instant Edelmann/Bruce looked puzzled. Fox took the opportunity to propel himself towards the catalyst.

  Then he thought of the Titan, leaving that abomination where it belonged. Just another piece of junk on a mountain of memories.

  That's how heroism is built. Or did you think this was a game?

  Julian F. Malek, Silk Bullets

  Through the two command room entrances poured the two torrents of parasites. Entrenched in the meager wall that was the circle of screens and control terminals, President Dereck Simmons and Janitor Douglas Jameson were firing at anything that moved. On either side were piled the corpses of those infernal beings, their rage and their shrieks fanned by the sight of their fellows fallen before those insignificant beings. The pool of lime green blood covered the floor of the room until it covered Simmons' ankles. The smell of bleach from those things flooded his nostrils, but somehow it sharpened his aim. It was the smell of heroism. His hands tingled under the increasingly hot gun butts. The parasites were drooling with rage, jumping over each other in order to get into the small room. Simmons pumped anger and fire. A sprinkler of death administering return passes to hell with the tireless rhythm of a jackhammer. The pumping of his heart had adapted to the cadence of the gunfire, and now he was the one dispatching the parasites directly. Boom-boom, boom-boom, left-right, left-right.

  The two mountains of monsters that had clogged both doors collapsed before two new waves of enraged devils finally pounced on them. When they ripped Simmons' uniform, the last photograph he had taken in the studio peeked out over his chest.

  In it, with his foot on the mountain of parasites, he raised a hopeful gaze to the sky.

  In his hands, the Crimson Sword shone with a hypnotic glow.

  Martin S. Puncel, The Fairy Forest

  Isaac Norton was trying to repair the propulsion system, though he knew it would be useless. A few steps to his left Fox materialized a couple of feet off the ground, so he dropped like a sack of potatoes.

  “I think I'm getting the hang of it,” Fox muttered.

  He was so covered in blood that it was hard to recognize him. He was missing a foot, and blood was gushing out of his side at an alarming rate.

  “Where did you come from?” Isaac said. “I'll take you to the medical ward.”

  When Fox tried to imagine the Titan's “medical ward” he lost consciousness.

  He woke up coughing, surrounded by a tangle of articulated arms and wires tingling around him through a cloud of
smoke. He smelled oil and fuel. He tried to escape.

  “Don't move, they're almost finished,” Isaac's voice said.

  Fox had already checked that he was strapped down anyway. One of those movable arms, whose structure seemed to be formed by the remains of an old plumbing system, placed a bandage on his side. Then the straps were loosened. A canned voice, which sounded to Fox like Isaac's, was heard, slightly distorted: “Thank you for using our services. Come back soon.”

  Wrapped in a blanket, Fox felt the warmth of the coffee flooding him. He held the cup in both hands, and took short sips, just enough not to burn his mouth.

  “I'm aware of the tensions between you and Dr. Edelmann,” said Isaac, shaking some crumbs from his bathrobe. I'm not interested in the details of what happened. I think what we have on our hands from now on is much more important. I must say that you seem much more relaxed. As if you've taken off a two-hundred-pound backpack that you've been dragging everywhere you go,” he walked to the window and gazed out at the new day in Erebus. A small wave broke against the spacecraft and splashed against the window. Pharex shone between two clouds of grayish clouds. “We must act immediately. It' s probably already too late.”

  “What's the plan?”

  “The luminarians designed the neural catalyst to suit the peculiarities of their minds, much more powerful than ours, I'm afraid. I mean, what may have been a relatively simple task for them may be very complicated for us. Or even impossible.”