Kraken Orbital

by James J. Stubbs

  Chapter 14

  Alone again

  She was gone so fast. And even though I haven’t known her for long at all, I already miss her and feel empty without her. Does that mean I was wrong? Does it mean she is real? If my mind had dreamed her from nothing, nothing other than my memory of her as a guard back at the mine, then why would she leave? If she was a product of my dismembered and lonely, anguish ridden imagination then she would still be here saving my pathetic self.

  But there is something else I need to ask myself. Something about her that has me off balance. It doesn’t seem right with me. Never before in my life has a girl propositioned me with a kiss out of the blue. Why would she? If she really has lost most of her memory then why would she just go and do that? I’m no oil painting. I know that. Especially not now, looking as I do, like I’ve been dragged backwards through hell twice. So maybe she is lying. Maybe she does remember me and secretly liked me as much as I did her. But my own self doubt turns that away immediately as an explanation.

  So I guess I have to just take her at her world this far. She is lost. She has lost her memory and is willing to just go with the flow of things. Maybe she’s given up and just isn’t showing it. This world is desperate and it does sap the life out of you. Maybe she’s the same in that sense. And I guess in the face of death, you take what you can get. That’s a little shallow, I know. But it’s all I’ve got at this moment in time. But I do believe in my heart that she’s real. So at least there’s that.

  I try to focus on that and drag my eyes slowly away from the gap in the cold and static metal blast doors that she had slipped through. I try one last time to peer back through the gap after her. But it’s too dark. A part of me, a much larger part than I would like to admit, wants to call her name just so that she will come back. But I need to buck up my ideas and allay my fears.

  I can do this. I need to check out this area. I’m supposed to be looking for anything that might help us to get out of here but that’s a distant second on my list of priorities.

  The engine deck is shaped like a tall, towering and cavernous tube that reaches through many sections of the ship. I don’t have to see it, even though I can, to know what it would have looked like in full light and strength. I can just imagine it. I can picture it from the schematics that I poured over, like the nerd I used to be, or might even still be, in my bedroom back at home.

  I cast my eyes up and down, trying to make out the shapes of the dark reaches above and below. I can see, now that Lucy is gone and I have nothing else to look at, that the spiral staircase running around the outer shell of the tube is cracked and broken. It reaches down into depths beyond the power of my sight.

  Even though it is in runs I am certain that I can make it over them and get down safely. I am sure, unless my memory is gone, that the control panels and the like are down at the far bottom. That was where I would look for any sign of Kolt.

  I need to know if he was real. If he was a ghost or an apparition. A fictional character that my mind called upon to get me through a horrid experience, or if he really perished here in this ship many years ago. I don’t care about getting off this planet. Not right now. My mind is hungry for answers and I can’t keep denying it of them.

  So I guess that I need to go and check out the rest of the engine room. As I cast my eyes over from one end and to the other, I listen with as much concentration as I can. The ringing in my ears, caused by my latest fall, still hasn’t gone away and it’s starting to annoy me. I’m trying to listen to anything lurking in the silence and the constant e-sharp tone in my ear won’t go away so that I can.

  I should really give myself a break. I’ve been through a lot and I don’t mean that to sound like I want some sympathy, even if it would only be from myself. I haven’t slept in what feels like days and I’m loosing concentration fast. But I need to keep going. I need to keep pushing and trying to find that next level, that last drop of power in the well spring of my mind.

  With a deep sight I turn to the metal railing that runs all along the walkway. The one we emerged onto from the exhaust vent. I can see the way down but it is shrouded in darkness. Not just dark in the sense that the light, what little there is, cannot break through far enough. It’s almost like a dark fog. Like a smoke. And then there is that smell again. The feint, tantalizing and mystifying yet comforting smell of old fires and log burners.

  The dark that shrouds the levels below is volumetric. Not just a veil but a choking mist. I sigh again. Without meaning to. I promised myself that this would be a line in the sand. That I would forget whoever I was before all of this.

  The short tempered and short fused, and let’s face it, ass that I think I am. The guy who can’t even crack a smile at a familiar face. Who can’t even thank a stranger for their help. My heart sinks as I remember the way Kolt virtually dragged me this far. And I suddenly realize but only now that I never thanked him. Not properly. Before he went away.

  So that means I have to keep going. Past that mist and mystifying darkness. Because I owe him at least the effort of finding out what happened to him. Maybe that would give him closure. Of course, all assuming that he was real, or ever was real.

  ‘Come on Parker.’ I say under my breath with yet another unplanned and unsolicited sigh. A shrug lightly of the shoulders. And I make my first step towards the staircase that runs along the outer side of the cylindrical room.

  My footsteps bounce off every wall as the metal of the walkway creaks and groans beneath my weight. The bolts scream in protest, the ones that secure the structure at every wall, as I make my way lightly to the first step.

  As I bravely enter the mist it comforts me in a way that I never thought that it would. It wraps itself around me like a blanket in the night and warms me. I relax and continue to step down one at a time. The bolts don’t screech any more and the walls don’t cry anymore for a past glory that is no more.

  I’m more than a little surprised that I can hear voices coming from the distance. And even though my heart immediately starts racing in protest, I quicken my pace towards those voices. Because I recognize at least on of them.

  As my feet race at a volume my heart is not comfortable with, the mist recedes and the light from behind it peels away. The structure around me looks as new and I can see men hurriedly going about their work below.

  I can see uniformed and disciplined men sat at terminals while others rush from one desk and to the other with instructions and orders. I can see they are in crisis mode. Once the darkened mist that once shrouded and comforted me dissipates I can hear the alarms. And feel the fury of the flames.

  I must be dreaming. I want to rub my eyes, to kick myself, to pinch my own arm or something else that you might expect. But I’m frozen to the spot. In admiration. In despair. I’m not sure which or even if that’s it.

  Because I can see Kolt standing there in the middle of it all. Tall, as I knew him, and with his shoulders pinned back in pride. He was an officer on board the ship and he was going down with it. I could sense the panic in the room, but I could not feel it. Even though it would seem that the events, the events I assume that ended the life of this Kraken and of all those on board, seemed to be unfolding before me.

  I feel distanced from them. Like some safely guarded part of my mind knew that it was wrong. That it couldn’t be. That I must be hallucinating or in some other dream like state. I can see the ship falling from the embrace of deep space. I can feel it falling desperately, on fire and burning as it falls, through the atmosphere of the planet on which it came to rest, the surface of which I must still be stood upon.

  But I’m not afraid by it. I can feel the rush in my stomach as gravity steps back in and does nothing to help the doomed ship. But it’s vague. It’s distant. I guess the best way that I can describe it to myself is that it felt like I’m playing a simulation of what happened.

  I can feel and even to some smaller extent partake in the exhilaration of the event. But I know t
hat it’s ultimately false, and that I’m ultimately not a part of it and will be safe from it at the end.

  In the presumed safety of the future, given that what I was witnessing could only be a part of the past, I took the time to admire the Kraken in the prime of it’s life. Even if it was at it’s very end. My eyes are unstoppably drawn to the dazzling patterns the ionized gasses make as they swirl around the outer shell of the hyper drive engine. The swirling colors project onto the floor and wash the room in dazzling and beautiful lights. It’s like an organic movement. Or so it seemed to my ignorant mind. It seemed that the engine was alive. But in pain.

  ‘Fire the jet engines into full reverse.’ Kolt yelled at he top of his voice over the ruckus. He raised a powerful and unshaken arm to a distressed younger man, dressed much the same as he, in the gown I had grown to like despite its garish nature. The young man glanced back, from his place arched over his work station, to Kolt with fearful and almost teary eyes.

  But he didn’t question and did as he was asked. If only I’d had Kolt there to tell me where and when to fire the jet engines to slow down descent. I might not have crashed and ended up in this mess in the first place.

  ‘Yes commander.’ He said. The brief and desperate exchange over. I can again feel the power of the Kraken’s mighty reverse jet engines, but they don’t scare me as I thought they ought to. I remembered, but only a had a brief moment to enjoy the sense of childish emotion it gave me to remember it, that this ship truly was where the old met the new.

  The hyper drive engine, as powerful and as mighty as I though the first of their breed to be, was so completely dependant upon a jet engine as it’s crutch when it came to landing. A smile stretched across my face but it was brief.

  It was knocked off me, and all sense of happiness with it, as I watched the hyper drive shell explode. And Kolt, along with every member of his team, engulfed in the resulting flames.

  Strange what your mind thinks after an event. When there is nothing that can be done to prevent or improve it. Even though I suppose an observer such as me could have done nothing anyway. But I had noticed, and unintentionally ignored, the ionized gasses stop to move. I guessed, there and then before the flames washed into me as well, that they must have had something to do with the cooling of the engine.

  I wish I could know more about what happened. Was it battle damage, an accident? Or something more sinister like internal sabotage? I guess I was not meant to know. I was just supposed to know what happened to him. Or else my dream or vision or whatever this is would have shown me more.

  I can see him writhing in pain. I can see him dance with the fire that swallows him. Trying so desperately to worm his way out of it’s embrace. But it was not meant to be. I could swear that as he died, he looked right at me, with those bloodshot and piercing eyes. I can see him pause, then with one last fit of energy, whatever he had left in him, try to pull at his gasmask that had become welded to his face. To his skin and his uniform’s leather too.

  And with that one last surge of energy he fell to the floor. And the fire consumed him again. Leaving nothing left of him for me to mourn over. And all I can do, is all that I had done the first time I had seen him die. Watch. Helplessly.

  My eyes were pinned open until the fire had gone. Until the Kraken slammed into the mountain side. Where upon it still rests. And until the ship, dead, as I knew it, returned from the vision in which I had seen it.

  I shook my head from side to side to try to get rid of the sudden onset of a headache. Or should that be another headache? Even though I know what I saw. Even though I could feel, in some sense or another, I could feel the death of the Kraken, I had to ask. Was that a dream? Was it made up, like another imagination? I didn’t have the answers right there and then.

  I couldn’t figure out what had happened and that meant one thing. My mind was still not satisfied and I needed to know more.

  That was what spurred me on. That’s what made me follow the creaking stairs further down into the bowels of the ship. The desire to know more. To find out what really happened to Kolt. Or should that be, to find out whether or not that vision was what really happened to him.

  In that vision he was burned to a crisp. Consumed in the fire until there was nothing left of him. I don’t know if the answers will still be there for me to discover but I’ll try anyway. I owe him that. Whatever he was, he kept me alive through some really hard times.

  I eventually make my way to the bottom of the staircase. My fingers, I hadn’t even noticed, were white from the exertion of my grip against the stair rail. This place had me spooked. It had me on edge. The very edge of whatever edge it had me on.

  I know I promised myself that I would let this change me. That I would let Lucy change me and that I would be a new man because of her. That I would forget the ass that I used to be and that I would start again. But there was no point in lying to myself and telling myself that meant that I wouldn’t feel things like fear and regret.

  I need to be honest with myself and use that emotion to drive me. It doesn’t mater that I’m scared. I needed to keep moving and keep trying nonetheless. And that’s why I keep going. That’s why I stride proudly and bravely over the flame soaked and charcoaled floor to the first station that I can see. The first terminal that looked like it might still have some life left in it.

  What am I thinking? I scream inside of my own head. This thing is never going to work. It’s dead. Dead like me. Dead like this ship. There must be no power left to turn on the screen so that I can search for some kind of video record of my friend. A diary entry, a record of my friend in whatever form, I didn’t care. But I try anyway.

  I kneel down to look at the housings, cased in hidden conduits that ran along the burnt floor, and make sure that all the cables are properly connected before trying the power button again and again. I know that the hyper drive, a constantly churning power house of energy, is what powered and charged the ancient lithium batteries this old crate used. Again another reference of the old meeting the new. And that meant that I knew they would be discharged after all this time. But I tried anyway.

  And by something, something that I hesitate to dub a miracle but must call it so anyway, it actually turns on. I shake my head twice. Check the cables again and bat the screen with my open palm just to check, just to assure myself that it isn’t just my own imagination. But it isn’t. I’m sure. I check again. But it’s right.

  There is still life left in it and I can see the information slowly load and the ancient computer screen. It, like the Kraken and like Kolt himself, was frozen as it was when it crashed. In alert mode.

  A mirror, a ghost, of it’s last moment. My thoughts turn for just a moment to Lucy. I can’t help but wonder about her. I wonder if she has found anything of use. Anything that might help her and might help us. If she is even real. But I try so hard to shunt those thoughts out of my head and they reluctantly go when I focus hard on the warning message upon the screen before me.

  It’s in Russian but the bold colors and strong, bright orange and red fonts give the purpose away. It must be touch screen. There isn’t a keyboard. I struggle to remember, even though I’m trying as hard as I can to, whether or not those things had stopped being the norm by the time this thing was built.

  I wipe the screen with my palm, since I don’t have a clean cloth or anything I can use instead, to clear it from dirt and flame scarred soot. When I rub my hand over the static charged screen for the fifth time the warning message disappears completely.

  The screen feels hard. Not how it should. The normal screen would have felt subtle, almost spongy and fresh. That’s how the ones on the rig felt, even though I didn’t get much chance to touch them before I crashed the damn thing. It must just be a sign of it’s age or something. But despite that small drawback, it still works.

  I can’t make out much of the Russian text. Like I had a clue about languages. I recognize a few Russian words but mostly only when they are
spoken. The Russian language uses a different alphabet all together. So it’s hard to relate the phonetic sounds to the symbols that may as well be alien. They are to me anyway.

  I wish I had a way to contact Lucy. It’s really strange how much I miss her even though she was only with me for a brief few hours. I hope she’s ok. She might even know some language skill.

  But there it is, staring me in the face. A word not too dissimilar from it’s English equivalent. Gespenst. The word I figured before, the one that means Ghost in it’s native tongue. That must have been some kind of record of Kolt. With the vision I just saw, more experienced, still rattling around my head this just adds more questions to the mire that will go largely unsorted.

  But I run my hand, as lightly as I can, a few times over the screen until it accepts the input. The dirt on my fingers and age of the screen must be hampering the interface. I can feel some sort of frustration rising inside me as I try and try again and again to open the link and nothing happens. I was never any good with technology either. I was better with a hammer and an axe. Hence my line of work. Even though it should have been called slavery.

  Finally the link follows through and images start dancing on the screen. There are dead pixels all over the old LED (Light Emitting Diode) screen, another sign of it’s age, but I can still make out the video that has began to play.

  I don’t know how to feel as I watch the same scene as I had just witnessed unfold again. Not as a vision this time but as a recording. My hairs all over my body stand on end, my heart pounds and I am filled with an obscure mix of elation and heartache.

  I see Kolt, stood centre frame in the recording, giving out his orders with pride and authority. I thought he was only a Private. He doesn’t act like one. I add that question to the mire too. Maybe his commander got himself killed and he had to take over. That part would have to remain a mystery, simply because I don’t care to pry further.

  I answered what I wanted to know. Kolt was real. At some time, in some form, he was real. I hadn’t imagined him. Hence the confusing mix of emotions surging through my blood.

  I’m glad he was real. I really am. I would have felt weak and powerless if I had found he had been a figment of my desperate imagination. So my ego, that battered and bruised ego of mine, was soothed after all. But it just meant something more harrowing was unfolding on this world. One that didn’t sit right with everything that I thought I had known right up until today.

  The dead live. Or they relive. However which way I could put it, it still made no sense. But it was clear that the dead were restless on this world and they remained here as ghosts. That didn’t mean I could accept it yet.

  My mind, without my permission and barely without my knowledge, switched back to thoughts of Lucy. How can I trust her now? I thought Kolt was just a man. A survivor. One totally off his rocker but a man nonetheless. And he was not. Not anymore. I need to shake it off. But I can’t.

  Through the burning questions and raging confusion all that I can think is that I hope she is ok. I don’t want what happened to Kolt to happen to her. I want her to be real. Flesh and blood like me. I didn’t know I had any feelings left. But what I had left, what remained, they were all for her.

  I tried to revive the screen when it died but it wouldn’t turn back on. Even though I know what I saw, both in my obscure vision and in the CCTV recording, I would have liked to see it again just to make sure.

  Not that I wanted to watch him die over and over again. But just another time might finally squash any doubt left over in my mind. I guess it will have to do.