by Allen Ivers
Locklear may have been several hundred miles below, but he sounded like he was resting right next to Leo with his reassuring words, “No amount of preparation was going to protect us from what we found. Believe me.”
There it was again, that burning wrapping a cold fishing line around his throat. What the Hell did they find down there?
“There’s a research post, right? Maybe the colonists broke for there?” Locklear was trawling for anything to go on, anything to keep himself busy. Anything to keep himself from doing what Leo was doing. “Who was the resident squint?”
Leo swallowed down that scalding feeling, as he tried to recall. “Doctor Raines. Eliza Raines.”
Chapter 7
Unknown
It burned, right behind her eyes. Red hot pain pumping through her wrists and her ankles and her nose.
She tried to focus on those details, ground herself in the data. She tried to meter it all, from pain levels to the temperature burning her skin and the volume of the sounds that rang around her ears.
Every thought was returned with a pincushion of rolling blades prickling along her scalp and her legs. It hurt to work her jaw, to move her fingers, even to breathe. So she leaned into the numbers.
On a scale of 1 to 10, her eyes burned with an 8 -- the level of a mild fracture or a bad burn. It could absolutely get worse, but this was severe. The levels didn’t spike either, but waxed and waned, with definitive and predictable peaks and valleys, rolling hills.
Not quite a sine wave, less consistent than that -- no, this came with the rather unmistakable chaos of another controller, someone pawing at a dial, raising and lowering dependent only on eccentric criteria.
This wasn’t torture; this was testing. Data collection. She was the subject of the experimentation.
Raines could feel it reaching, walking through her, pulling on the bow strings of her body. It would dial up and down dependent on her responses, as much as it would to maintain regularity. A control experiment, perhaps, without outside influence. And then careful application of outside stimuli to measure response.
It was studying her. May as well try to do the same.
She couldn’t see much, the green glow intense enough to burn through her eyelids. She could almost see the blood pumping through the capillaries, matching the crests and falls of pain.
She could not open her eyes, as though they had been fused shut. This was not a physical binding, but a lack of ability. Her captor was too strong, too thorough. She wasn’t able to so much as blink.
What could be heard? Listen, carefully now. A heartbeat. Her own. Look past that. What else?
Echoes. Stone, but muted. Far away. But more relevant than all that, she could hear metallic beeping, a computer speaker? Fast but regular, a computerized metronome synced to the sine wave -- no, synced to the blood pulsing, synced to her heart rate.
Her suit’s heart monitor. She was still in her suit.
A surge, pain peaking, stabbing hot and white. A response? Did it notice her observing? Was it trying to stop her? A theory, but one that had to be tested.
A control experiment of her own. Take control of this moment. Silence the mind and keep quiet. Measure its impulses upon the system.
Burns, pricks screeching against her skull. And yes, they did abate in kind.
Now to begin the testing. Hearing, seeing. Touch was useless if she was in her suit. What else could she do?
Raines tried to focus, the pain more constant than before, the hills longer than the valleys now. The heart monitor, now that she’d found it, was just distracting with its accelerating series of warning beeps.
She had to block it out, shift focus. What other senses could she use? Smell?
Slate, like wet stone. Not like the beach; absence of salt. So not sweat either. But humidity for sure. What’s more, she could smell it clean through the nylon of her suit – that implied a breach of some kind.
There had to be some way for the smells to reach her.
It didn’t like that discovery very much. It pulsed hard, harder than she thought possible. Finding vocabulary to describe her circumstances was growing increasingly difficult. It wanted her to stop listening, stop watching, stop recording her surroundings.
It wanted her to relax, to lean back. It wanted her to take a long, well-deserved rest. It wanted her to disengage for but a moment and let someone else take over for her shift. It wanted to reward hard work and time invested with a tranquil slumber.
She’d worked for thirty eight hours straight during the week leading up to her Doctorate defense. She’d rest when she was done.
Metal in her mouth, bitter. Copper?
Adrenaline. A chemical release, designed to assist through times of stress.
This testing could not be healthy for her, long term. But short-term? What else could she deduce about her surroundings?
Ambulatory freedom. Her legs were restrained and she couldn’t move her hands, like pins and needles. But not numb. Distinct pricks and pulling on her wrists and arms, as the skin was lifted out gently and then released, snapping back into place.
Painless, or at least relatively so. Possibly collecting samples, but no way to ascertain that without more data. She could twist at her shoulders – sand bounced off her helmet, a tittering of rain.
Followed by the most inhuman of slurping sounds, dry and somehow deep.
This discovery rewarded her with a whole new battery of waves, rolling, surging, tidal forces that carried her off. The raw amount of pain induced an almost euphoric high. Her brain was trying to defend itself, dumping its entire stock of dopamine cocktail into her bloodstream to counter the extreme.
If she wasn’t careful, she would grow complacent, soften her edge. She would break.
Pace yourself. Learning cannot be rushed. She would have to study more later, but she was not going to rest just yet.
Chapter 8
Murcielago
The shuttle coasted in towards the hatch, tufts of white gas adjusting the angle of approach, matching the Murci’s eccentric orbit vector. Orbital rendezvous was always a complex procedure, despite it being reasonably simple mathematics when compared to the Hohman Transfer to reach Mars itself.
Nothing out here was a straight line, not even in small scale. High school math, but Leo never liked putting his life in the hands of anything that could be done by a sophomore orbital mechanics class. Not everybody passed that class, and of those that did, some indeterminate amount would forget to carry a one and get everyone killed.
Anything that simple just begged for a simple mistake. Swap a variable here, arithmetic error there, and the Murci would coast off into oblivion, waving a somber farewell at the distant Earth as they sailed past.
But this was just a docking maneuver. Once the shuttle had rendezvoused with the Murci, life got much simpler. This could be done by looking out the window, like backing into a parking spot. It shouldn’t be done that way, but it could. Almost more about feel than calculation.
Leo watched on the monitor, tied to an external camera on the docking collar. The shuttle had matched the velocity, and was nudging itself up with little gasps of air. Some would call it beautiful, a silent ballet against a backdrop that can’t be beat. Leo saw seventeen moving parts, any one of which could go wrong in spectacular fashion.
Dr. Gamble waited with a stretcher along with the two fine gentleman volun-told to participate, Kieran and kooky Rook. Big doofy Kieran couldn’t get that stupid smirk of his face, even in moments of crisis, and Rook was nervously bouncing himself from left to right, palming off each wall to float back and forth across the narrow causeway -- the zero gravity equivalent of tapping his foot.
Maybe he could argue he’d pulled a muscle in his forearm and not have to help. Or better yet, he could sit still and be patient like a grownup.
It was going to take no strength whatsoever to maneuver the patient, but plenty of hands helped to navigate the cumbersome cargo around the tight corridors. It wa
sn’t strictly a requirement to have so many hands on deck, but it was awful nice.
Moving a patient was a bit like moving a couch -- don’t bump it into the wall. And to get him down the difficult, tight ladder to Medical, there was a well-designed automated pulley system, keeping the introduction to gravity as painless as possible. It reminded Leo of that elevator they used to put into the back of a nondescript cargo van or onto the stairwell of his grandmother’s condo.
It felt like the world’s most expensive slide. All the times he’d ridden the thing up and down were now tainted with a cloud of guilt.
An echoing thud warbled through the hull as the docking collar locked onto the shuttle. Now, it was Leo’s turn in the spotlight.
Leo clicked his helmet in place and shoved off with one hand, starting the interminable float down the length of the collar toward the shuttle. He had plenty of time to consider all the horrible outcomes available, including some of the more fantastical options. It was nearly impossible to keep his head focused on the task at hand.
Simple checks had to be made before opening his side of the hatch: proper and stable air pressure, strong seals and physical locks, and all that. Medical emergencies didn’t require speed so much as precision.
Skip a beat, and you’d have to do all the checks again, wasting precious time. Rush and he might miss some critical fault in the system and kill the patient, doctors, and himself. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.
Can’t get a Band-Aid if he’s blown out to space.
He reached out with both hands, cushioning his arrival by grasping the two handlebars on either side of the hatch. One thing at a time. He’d hurried a similar emergency in his first voyage, and suddenly found himself upside down.
Neat as zero gravity can be, the panels don’t follow along with his rotation. Hard to read the screen when it’s writing right to left in what could only be hieroglyphics.
Take it nice and easy. Do this right. Bring everyone home.
“Whenever you want to let me at my patient, would be nice,” Gamble chirped from somewhere behind him, her deep and powerful voice barely muffled through both helmet and the six inch security door.
She might as well have been standing next to him. Or be in his head. Was she shouting, or did her voice tap into something more primal? That voice only a mother could use that compelled a person to sit in the damn chair and eat dinner.
“Quarantine procedure, Doc.” Leo’s radio crackled, a more patronizing reminder that he had meant. Time was precious right now and the stakes were high, but there was protocol to be followed.
“Maybe he’s just got the space flu,” Kieran, the eternal optimist, murmured back through the multiple sound-buffering materials. It’s like he didn’t remember how deadly influenza used to be.
Leo shook his head, as he pulled the creaking handle that opened the shuttle’s fuel line -- the final lock of several that mated the two stellar objects as one.
And as soon as he had, both airlock hatch and shuttle door swung open at the same time -- clearly they were giving great care to quarantine procedures, but Leo could quite frankly give a shit.
Gamble and her volunteers floated down the tube to meet little Romanov, poking his head out of the shuttle like a terrified French bulldog. “He is not looking well.”
Gamble didn’t even acknowledge him, gliding past into the shuttle proper. Leo wanted to go look, go see, curiosity rearing its tenacious head, but he had his own job to do right now. This shuttle needed to be ready to go for any eventuality, and there were several chilling options available.
A few of which the ground team had already found. Time to start preparing for the more bizarre options on the table. They needed the bus back down there fast, too. If the situation was half as bad as reported, Leo suspected the colony was going to be declared a total loss and to just scrub the entire thing.
A good scenario involved everybody going home. Everybody left, anyway.
A diagnostic plug stared back at him from next to the hatch door, placed for the convenient access of technicians like Leo. He slotted a simple cable into place and the screen on Leo’s wrist came to life with numbers and codes, a language spoken only by gearheads and enterprising linguists.
More often than not, this would tell him what maintenance he had to do before turning the thing back planet-side. Sometimes, it said nothing, and that either meant the shuttle was in tip-top condition, or the program was sulking.
He hated a No Code. Because then he had to double-check it all manually. Computers – it’s always something.
To his mixed reception, he had three codes popping up on screen. Simple enough: the ceramics on the left wing had burned thin and needed to be replaced, like rubber on a tire; the landing gear wasn’t fully locked in its bay; and the fuel filter needed cleaning.
That’s what he deserved for wishing for codes. Routine maintenance that would swallow precious time. An EVA would be necessary before they could retrieve Locklear and the survivors.
Survivors. Not a nice way to think about any part of this. Who is that? They’re from Manifest-1. Pioneer, scientist… survivor.
Clanging and banging. Inside the shuttle.
People grunting, snapping at each other. Struggling. Something thrashing just out of sight.
Oh, here we go. Another one of those bizarre options right out of the handbook of ‘I Don’t Need This Shit’ by Mr. Fuck Right Off, Esq. Leo did not need any more excerpts from that epic piece of literature right now.
“Everything okay, Doctor Gamble?” Leo’s radio choked out into the air.
No response, at least not to him. The exertion continued. Locklear had warned them that the survivor hadn’t been the most cooperative.
Maybe they needed a hand? His hands, though? Kieran could squish Leo’s head in just one of his meaty gorilla gloves. What’s one more body going to do but make it crowded in there?
That’s when he heard it, a noise that stopped all the others. Muffled by his suit, maybe, but it sounded wet and heavy, like cooking oil spilling on to the floor.
He wanted to speak, his jaw working and lips flapping, but his voice decided to hide. Like he should be. Every instinct in his body told him to flee, every hair on his body standing on end, an electric storm of rational thought clawing its way forward from the recesses of his lizard ancestors -- Run.
“Fuck this,” Leo muttered, shoving himself back toward the Murci, but keeping his eyes on the open hatch to the shuttle.
He’d gotten what he needed after all, no reason to hang out nearby out of a perverse lack of survival instinct. He had his work to do.
That’s when somebody said the magic words.
“Don’t touch it!”
Touch what?
Before he could see it, it hit his helmet. Hard. So fast, it may as well have teleported there. Its shape occluded most of his bulbous helmet, wet and grabbing, grasping.
He knew he was spinning because what bits of the world he could see past its pawing arms blurred into a neutral color wheel.
It was almost like a starfish, but wet and translucent, maybe two feet maximum from tip to tip. Its flesh rippled like waves on a pond, bits of light flashing inside, sparking red and violet chains across its frame. Small, reaching fingers -- microscopic cillia, but of the more large and invasive variety.
They pawed at the surface of the glass in some kind of pattern known only to the owner. A blind man studying a face, painting a portrait by exploration.
He could see it ebb and flow, the invertebrate allure of motions only it could make. Its whole body would tense, release, and squeeze.
The glass of his helmet cracked under the pressure.
His head slammed backward, his furious spin stopping with a chance encounter with the wall, his tumbling body having finally found some part of the rigid world.
Leo never thought he’d be happy someone made the suit so big, big enough to incidentally hit a wall just before something unspeakable. His body slid up the wa
ll of the collar, the residual force from his spin propelling him to rest halfway up the roof.
The blow was disorienting for the starfish as well. It popped loose of his helmet, fluttering away through the air like a jelly. A slimy residue stained the cracked glass, but past that grime...
It was going for the airlock door, toward the Murci.
Quarantine procedure -- they hadn’t closed the door behind them. Stupid.
Leo kicked himself off the wall, aiming right for the shuttle hatch. A few keystrokes, and the airlock door would slap shut on both ends. Trap it outside. With him. Oh, sweet Jesus, was he really going to do this?
He landed at the panel so hard he bounced off, barely able to snag one of the handles for purchase. Peering past the cracks in his helmet, his fat fingers pawed at the keypad, searching for the correct numerals just as his mind tried to find them. A few blunt strikes and the airlock door whined as it began to drift down, almost courteously slow.
Too slow.
Of course. Fast motion means inertia, extra energy, and flex in the hull. It was a structural concern. And right now, a death sentence of a different kind.
Sure enough, the little starfish slipped by as the door closed behind it. Leo bit his tongue to avoid from screaming, in anger, fear, confusion.
What the hell was that?
One voice, distant and babbling, a voice he didn’t recognize, cut through Leo’s own internal screaming. It repeated two words, over and over again, like a comforting chant:
“It’s gone. It’s gone -- it’s gone -- it’s gone...”
It didn’t hurt him. That’s how he phrased it. DeShaun Mathers had spent the better part of a month in thrall to the Starfish Jelly monster from Mars.
But it had never hurt him, not in so many words.
It was more akin to an itch, a powerful compulsion that had to be scratched, but no matter how deep he reached, he couldn't quite get it. Until he twisted just right and it felt so good to finally get at. Somehow, it made him enjoy doing its bidding.
