Kraken Orbital

by James J. Stubbs

  Chapter 18

  Second Disc

  ‘I think I found a way out of the sector.’ Lucy whispers to me, with her eyes still closed and her head still pressed firmly against my chest.

  ‘How?’

  ‘I only slipped in here to take a look. I pressed something and released that gas. Sorry by the way.’ I chuckle at her. Even though it had been traumatic at the time, it was okay now and I appreciate her little joke to lift our moods.

  ‘It’s alright.’

  ‘But back out the way we came I’m sure there’s some kind of shuttle, maybe like a train I guess, to the other side of the ship.’ I lift her head off me. I don’t want to and she didn’t want to go either but we need to go.

  ‘Let’s go check it out then?’ She responds to my gesture and we move out of the lab. Hand in hand.

  I know there’s something wrong. I don’t consider myself very emotionally intelligent, and I never have done. But I can tell there is something the matter with her. I can feel it. In the air, through her hand, in her eyes. I don’t know what it is. I don’t want to ask either. I just have to hope that she’s going to be ok. I just have to make sure she is. She wipes a final tear away as we leave the lab behind.

  ‘Do you have any weapons on you?’ I ask her a bit sheepishly. I’m worried about how many of her people are hiding in the shadows around the broken shell of the ship. And I’m more than a little bit worried about what they’re capable of. But I don’t even want to think about them. And the ways that I found them.

  ‘Yeah.’ She reaches under her jacket and pulls out two handguns. ‘Take one.’ They are laser based weapons. Like the ones I had briefly used back at the mine to make my escape. I almost hoped they were older. I disguise my disappointment and just say thanks. I had hoped they were like Kolt’s ancient projectile antique. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s the ship. That feeling that I’m in a different time.

  Lucy leads us through another parting door and out into a more open space. The largest we have been in since the engine room. It’s some kind of transport hub. At least it used to be. It looks and feels like a railway station for want of a better description. It’s the size of a large warehouse. Untouched and preserved, away from the flames and trauma that brought the ship down and killed all aboard.

  Shipping containers line the walls, stacked atop one another. They’re blue and green in color, all still locked and stowed away. There could have been anything inside of them. Shame there’s no time to look. I let my mind carry away with a nice thought that it would be awesome to come back here. Once we were rescued of course and in far greater numbers for the sake of safety, to study the place and dig up some fanciful relics of the past.

  We emerge into the space via a door at the top of the room. The entrance is built like a stadium. Steps line the first wall and we follow them down into the main boarding, warehousing and distribution area. It’s nice to see some color. We had been deprived of it for far too long as we made our way through the scarred and flame dissolved ship. There’s a train of sorts waiting on the line. Lucy must be right. This must lead us through a long shaft and out into the other side of the ship.

  I’m surprised at myself. I thought I had a fairly intimate knowledge of the ship. The place is lit by a large hole in the side wall of the tunnel ahead. The light is dingy but adequate. It makes the room cold though. It’s easy to forget this thing had come aground atop a snowy mountain when we were usually unsettlingly warm inside.

  ‘Let’s see if we can get it working then.’ I may as well have been talking to myself. She doesn’t reply. What’s bothering her? I smile at her, even though she doesn’t hold my eyes, and make the last few steps onto the platform ahead.

  The train ran on tracks that lined the roof. It consists of two basic carriages and little more. It has a small engine bay but no pilot seat. It’s probably a fully automated system. I study it in the low level lighting from below. There’s a stairway that led to the left hand side. I dart up the hollow structure and into the first carriage. It’s like a time capsule. Totally preserved and intact. Eerie.

  ‘Lucy!’ No reply. ‘Come up here.’

  The train, without any kind of prompt from me, lurches into life. I make a dash for the door but don’t make it. Lucy ran into me there. Before we knock heads I manage to grab her by the waist and pull her inside before the door slowly slid closed. Even the lights flicker on. The ones inside the carriage and the ones inside the tunnel too. It illuminates the place in a cold and pale ambience. Like a clinical light. I don’t let her go.

  ‘I found the on switch.’ She smiles but only briefly. She let me hold her and I’m glad of it. That must mean I hadn’t upset her too much. She even slid her hands around my neck and cradled herself there. She placed her forehead against my chest bone and just sighed a few times.

  ‘Come on?’ I ask her and lift her chin with just a finger. ‘What is it?’ She just shakes her head free of my grip and says nothing. I have to let it go. I can’t risk our new found relationship, whatever the Hell that is, by shouting it out of her. Besides. I still want to be a different kind of man. I need to fight the impatience building within and just let her come to me.

  ‘Okay.’ I whisper in her ear. I hug a little tighter for a few moments but have to let go.

  I take another much slower look around the thin carriage. There’s a few posters on the wall space between the large windows. They must be inspirational and work ethic focused images. But the text is in Russian so I can’t understand it fully. No need to anyway.

  ‘Did you check the track for damage?’ The thought suddenly hit me. We had set off into the unknown and done no kind of safety check. This thing could fall right out of the air if the track had split during impact!

  ‘No… I don’t even know if there was a way to.’ She’s starting to perk up. Maybe just distracted by the further challenges I threw at her. Either way I’m glad. The instructions on whatever screen or command module she used must have been in Russian too. She had done well to get it going at all.

  ‘Let’s move into the forward carriage. See if we can get a better view of the track.’ I hold out my hand, she takes it, and we jog through the carriage and into the next. The train bounces under our weight. Like a swing bridge might or a smaller suspension or rope bridge would.

  The next carriage is identical. Featureless. Since there’s no pilot, and the engine is seated somewhere beneath the carriage as I had seen during my brief inspection, the front of the train is just one panoramic window. I tap it. It’s not glass. Must be some kind of plastic based but reinforced polymer of some kind. With the lights somehow working I can see a good way ahead. No bends or at least no obvious breakages in the section of track. In the distance I can even see the end of the tunnel. Right at the far end is a massive cargo door that I can only hope will open upon our approach.

  ‘I think we should be okay.’ Lucy is right by me. With one hand placed on the glass front of the train and leaning into me. ‘Lie down.’ I tell her and point to one of the seats behind us. It’s a long bench where she can get a little rest. She takes me by the hand instead, turns me around, and pushes me down onto the seat first. And then straddles her legs across my knee before rubbing her hands up and down my chest. It feels good to have her so close.

  ‘So.’ I start but struggle to carry on. ‘What is it you like about me?’ That was brave I thought. She just shrugs and smiles.

  ‘You first.’ She teases me.

  ‘What’s not to like?’ To Hell with it. Be brave.

  ‘That’s nice…’ She stops mid sentence. Probably at the sight of my face. That look of shock and terror that I can barely hide.

  There’s something in here with us. In the tunnel. Creatures of some kind.

  ‘What is it?’ She leaps from my knee and spins around. There really is no mistaking what they are. They’re dinosaurs of the winged variety. They must have gotten in here through the many holes in the hull. Known my luck, and kno
wn the general pace of this crappy day, we’re probably sailing right through their nest or something.

  Lucy reaches for her handgun but I have different ideas. These things, the dinosaurs, had been extinct on Earth for millions upon millions of years. I want something old. Something old to fight something older. I start rummaging through a few lockers at the side of the main carriage. She’s busy prepping her weapon and getting into some sort of fight mode. She barely even gives me a glance. An axe! Double edged too like some kind of ancient sea trident weapon. Now we’re talking. I throw that on the floor by my feet with more than just a touch of enthusiasm. But I keep looking. This is a war ship after all.

  Why wouldn’t there be some kind of guns, old ones, like the one Kolt had at the beginning, lying around somewhere. I come across a handgun of sorts. It’s bulky and heavy in my grip. There’s just something about it. Something so much more real than the plastic toy ray gun Lucy had given me.

  ‘Here.’ I pass it back to her. She’s glaring out of the forward window. Waiting there, poised to strike and deadly focused. It’s a little sexy but I let that thought pass. More important things to do after all. She looks at me like I had just drooled all over my armor, then looked to the gun and axe that I had found with some contempt mixed with thinly disguised concern.

  ‘You can’t fight with those antiques.’ She cocks her head aside but keeps her boots planted in her combat stance, facing the window with one small step forward, like a boxer entering the ring.

  ‘Well, I am a miner.’ I smile, making light of a situation that I should be taking a lot more seriously, and throw the axe to spin in the air before catching it on the way back down.

  ‘Do you even know how that piece of dirt works?’ She finally abandons her stance for just a second to grab the gun I had found out of my hand. She starts messing with it. Ejected the chamber of bullets, reinserted it and pulled back on the catch. ‘At least there is a full mag.’ She concedes and gives it back to me. She held it in her hand as I tried to take it in mine.

  ‘That’s the safety.’ She takes my index finger and presses it against a button along the side of the but of the gun. That must have turned it off. I’m starting to wish Kolt was still here. I guess it is a bit embarrassing, even knowing what century we live in, having a girl show me how to shoot. I fight the urge to laugh when I think about what Kolt might have said about it. “Take gun, point at creature, shoot.” He would have no issue fending these ancient beasts away. She smiles nervously toward me and pushes my hand away.

  ‘Don’t point it any where near me.’ She chuckles and refocuses on the window ahead. The flying monsters are becoming unsettled all the more with every inch further we travel along the tracks.

  I’ve nothing more to say to her as I feel my stomach sink into a pit with nerves. This could be it. We’re really up against it this time. “Come on Parker!” I think to myself and start jumping on the spot to another look of daggers from Lucy. I swing the axe around my head a couple of times to get used to the weight balance but that’s all the practice time the beasts are going to allow us. There’re at least twenty of the things fluttering around the tunnel up ahead now. I hope that’s all of them. It’s already more than enough. All it was going to take was one of them to start and to make the first move.

  ‘Head’s up Sam.’ Lucy shouts, even though there really is no need to, and aims her gun at the first of them to attack. She fires a couple of blasts through the window, shattering it into a million tiny pieces in the process, and floors the beast to an ear splitting shriek.

  ‘Nice.’ I shout to her, my axe pressed coolly against one shoulder. The wind picks up immediately and nearly throws me from what I thought was a solid stance. It rockets through the train and howls around my ears. If she took one out, I wanted the next one. I bravely move closer to the gap in the train that used to be the window, pull my handgun from its resting place against my thigh and brought it to my eye level.

  I fire. The gun blasts back against my grip and I nearly drop it. That would have been embarrassing beyond belief. The shot went far wide. I had no training for this kind of thing and had to fight two overwhelming feelings. One of total embarrassment as Lucy saw off my target with her laser weapon, and two, my frustration.

  Lucy takes full advantage of the short break we had earned by shooting two of the flying menaces out of the air. She darts behind me, holsters her two weapons, and takes a firm hold of both of my elbows. She pulls my arms as high as she can manage and rests her head against my shoulder blade.

  ‘Look right down the barrel of the gun, the sight should be accurate but you might need to adjust depending on how the bullet flies.’ I did. ‘Make sure what you want to hit is bang in the middle of the two notches at the end of the barrel, right there where the bullet comes out.’

  ‘Got it.’ I line up the next monster and aim for the biggest part of it. It’s leathery furless wing.

  ‘Don’t pull the trigger, treat it like you would me, and just give it a gentle squeeze.’ I feel her smile against my back.

  ‘Not really the time, Lucy.’ I protest even though it’s nice.

  ‘Sorry.’ She mumbles as I fire. The bullet stays true to the sight and rockets through the thin stretch of skin of the right wing of the formidably sized monster. It can no longer keep any balance in the air and falls to the floor of the large tunnel. I hadn’t killed it, but hopefully the fall will!

  ‘There you go.’ She let go of my elbows and returns to her station beside me. I’m blushing and can’t stop. But to my further embarrassment, she finds it all the more funny. I’ll get her back.

  We’re in the thick of it now. There’s more of them in the air and that short moment of training is no where near going to cut it for me. I hit one of three shots and even those aren’t well placed enough to bring whatever bird I had been aiming at down. Lucy is incredible. She stays calm, stays focused, and hits every target with ease. She alternates between guns as one would begin to overheat with artistic timing and precision. I wish I didn’t find it so damn appealing. It’s hard enough to hit my own damn targets without staring at her for most of the time.

  It’s too late to matter. As soon as I’m out of bullets, I just hurl my gun at one of them that gets too close. It just bounces off it’s armored chest plate and the creature is just annoyed rather than deterred by it. It lands on the edge of the window and the weight of it rocks the train from side to side and slows it down a lot. It can barely fit through the window and Lucy, despite blasting it over and over, can’t bring it down.

  I charge at it and slam into it’s chest with my shoulder. It just throws me back into the carriage and tries to duck in through the windowless hole. It’s viscous beak is as long as my outstretched arm and it’s wingspan longer than me and Lucy stood head to toe together. The distance from which we had been fighting them from had masked their true size and formidability. Time for the axe.

  I grip it tight with both hands and thought very briefly of the last time I had held one. When I beat my old boss down into the dirt. I tried to capture the aggression of that moment and multiply it by the frustration in my heart. Multiply it by the fact I want to save her and I can’t. That I want to save myself and I can’t. That I miss Kolt want him back. I took the axe and let it speak for me.

  I howl without knowing and let the rage burn through me. Let the fact we were doomed control me and fulfill me. The blade of the axe crunches into the chest of the beast and blood gushes from the open wound I had created. It showers over my face and tastes like warm iron. It’s nice. Warming and nourishing.

  Lucy takes to booting it over and over, trying as hard as she can to dislodge it from it’s perch on the window. The creature, pale and yellow, howls and groans as it loses more and more blood. I’m not stopping. Next shot of my axe I make for it’s lowered beak. It splinters across the carriage like a broken tree trunk.

  ‘It’s claws!’ Lucy shouts through powerful breaths and between aggressive kicks. I rai
se the axe up as high as I can and slam it down onto the clenched talons that held the ancient bird onto it’s housing in the carriage. That does it. It lets go and plummets with further ear splitting howls.

  I quickly count five more swirling and gliding around the tunnel. We’re getting really close to the blast door ahead, that would hopefully open automatically and allow us entry into the next section of the ship. That makes the fighting seem more intense. An added sense of urgency spurs us on to keep hitting out at them.

  Make that four. Lucy, once her laser weapons had cooled, blasts another out of the sky. I trust her to cover me and keep herself safe at the same time. So I drop my axe and fall to the floor. I brush shards of glass out of the way as I search frantically for the engine bay beneath the carriages. There has to be something in there. Something combustible. I cut my hands really badly but don’t care. I’m pumped with adrenaline and just need to get the job done. I’ll worry about it later.

  I finally brush enough of the glass away to find the blood soaked carpet. I use the tip of the axe to make a long incision in the thin material and start ripping at the edges of it. I pull the carpet right up and fold in aside. There’s a hatch right beneath me but it’s bolted securely down. I try the axe but there’s not enough of a gap to prize it open.

  ‘Lucy!’ I yell instinctively. She catches on fast and I turn away just a little. I trust her perfect aim. She fires a single shot into the corner of the square shaped hatch and that succeeded in frying the bolt in that area. That would be enough to get it open. She turns back around and continues her barrage of fire at the encircling monsters without even saying a word to me. It’s really easy to be impressed by her.

  I take the axe one more time and make a quick count. Lucy has shot down at least another two. That will leave at least two more unless more have gotten in. The axe makes contact with the underside of the hatch and I pull with every tiny bit of strength that I have left. It finally dislodges with a heavy scrape and I use my free hand to pull it open completely.

  ‘Good luck!’ Lucy shouts but still doesn’t turn around. She must have highly attuned senses and must have figured out what I was trying to do. I’m not sure where the thought is coming from or why it’s so persistent, I just know somewhere deep down that those blast doors just weren’t going to open!

  The engine bay is small and cramped with no space to work. I know the thing is likely electrical but that would have been powered by the first generation hyper drive, or at least a second generator attached to it somehow. But it’s still working right now, despite the fact the hyper drive had died hundreds of years ago. I saw the shell of it myself. I know the ship is robust and hearty but this is really taking the biscuit quite frankly. The flooded hall happened because an old system had only just now finally died. Something is keeping this train moving and my money is on a secondary diesel engine.

  And there it is. Chugging away at the front of the engine bay. I can hear it’s deep and tantalizing rumble and smell the fumes coming from it. There it is again. The old world, the dependable old world, meeting head on with the new. And this ship is a model to it as always.

  I’m crouched down as low as I can get just to fit in the tiny crawlspace. Beneath me is another hatch but this one is bigger and screws open easily. That would lead down into the tunnel so no need to open it. I turn around on the spot to be met head on with a selection of two barrels. Big old looking oil drums. I guess that must be the heavy oil that is keeping this ancient engine pumping. And I know that it burns.

  ‘How’s it going up there?’ I yell to Lucy and pop my head back out of the hatch. The smell hits me right away. It was the burning and charred metal from the housing she had blasted away.

  ‘I count two more.’ She must have had a brief break in their offensive because she tuned to face me for the first time in a while. That must mean she knows it’s safe to do so.

  ‘Help me with these?’ I ask her and she comes running. I heave the first barrel with all my strength, restricted as it is in the tight and narrow, fume filled space. She holsters her weapons and lays flat on her chest against the floor. She helps me all she can and we finally lever the first rounded barrel out of the narrow hatch. But she has taken too long. Her scream fills me with dread and instant pain.

  ‘Lucy!’ I shout as she is slowly dragged away by another of the flying dinosaurs that had found it’s way into the carriage. I can only just see that it has her by the leg. Her boot is protecting her but it had still broken the skin. She’s bleeding and is tearing up in front of me. I fight the reaction to grab for her flailing hands and try to pull her back to me. I know that won’t work.

  There’s no chance I can out arm wrestle a dinosaur of that size and strength. I leap from the hatch, grab for my axe and push my way past the beast’s huge wings and to it’s beak. I stretch up tall, and slam down into it with all the force of my body weight. It splinters into two and cracks right down the centre. It frees Lucy and she darts away like a scared child. That’s not like her one bit. She tucks her legs into her arms and weeps uncontrollably.

  ‘Hey! Snap out of it!’ That’s cruel but I swear it needs to be. Not that it worked. She didn’t even look back up. I’m worried about her a lot but I need to take the reins. Maybe I can save her after all. I swing the axe one last time and strike the monster at it’s eyes. More shrieks, howls and blood fills the air. The copious red blood spews from it’s wounds as a mist first then a river later. I dart back to the barrel full of volatile diesel and tip it over. I didn’t mean to spill it but it doesn’t matter. I can see, through all of the chaos and death, that blast door is getting closer and showing no sign at all of moving even a little.

  I heave at the barrel and roll it to the stumbling dinosaur in front of me. It’s heavy and I can only hope it will be heavy enough to dislodge it’s talons from the window frame.

  ‘Lucy!’ I scream at her even louder than before. ‘Gun! Now!’ She just about wakes from her panic and tosses one of them to me. Time for one hell of a stunt. I fire at the barrel as it rolls closer and closer to the beast ahead. The flames start rippling and licking at the barrel at first but it blows right at the correct time. It rips through the monster, tears it apart and rocks the chamber of the train from side to side. But it starts burning back towards us, alighting the pieces I had carelessly spilled on the way!

  ‘What are you doing?’ Lucy finally stands and jogs over to me. I point at the ever encroaching door ahead of us in the tunnel. I don’t need to add anything else. I dart, instead, back to the hatch in the floor and start pulling at the next barrel. There’s at least one more of those beasts out there and the same trick was never going to work again.

  ‘Help me!’ I scream at her, throwing my axe back on the floor as the final flying beast slams against the carriage and perches as the others had in the window. Lucy doesn’t hesitate this time. She starts pulling at the barrel and we manage to ease it out of the gap. She looks at me like I’m mad when I start unscrewing the cap on the head of the barrel.

  ‘Are you insane? You’ll blow us all to hell!’ She screams right in my ear over the noise of the stumbling dinosaur that scratches ever closer to us.

  ‘No! We’re jumping!’ I point down to the hatch in the floor of the engine bay below. She almost protested but didn’t. It’s nice that she trusts me too. Nice, so I thought, but also a burden if I have to be honest. She, without having to be told, starts unscrewing the bolts and finally releases the hatch from the open housing. She must have dropped it down because I hear a clash a few moments later. I’m too busy smothering the carriage in diesel. It catches fire quickly alongside the flames I had already caused and I finally lose my new found nerve. Time to get out. Right now!

  Lucy waited for me in the engine bay. I remember my axe. I take it from the floor and toss it through the open shaft and down into the tunnel below. That might come in handy any number of times and in any number of different ways. I duck down into the hatch and lower myself down
the newly opened access point and out into the cold of the tunnel. It isn’t that far to the ground. At least so it looked from where I was. I grip the side of the hatch as tightly as possible and look up to Lucy’s desperate face.

  ‘Climb down me!’ I keep flexing my fingers to keep the blood pumping as she starts lowering herself over me. Lucy drops down and grips the other side of the hatch before turning and taking hold of my shoulders. I had her full weight resting on me with her legs wrapped around mine. She starts snaking her way down, gripping onto whatever loose bit of my armor she can get a hold of. Finally she is hanging right off my feet. I dare to glance ahead. We only have moments before the crash!

  ‘Jump!’ I yell and she lets go. I wait only a moment to let her get clear and let go too.

  The impact shivers through my spine the second my legs touch the floor. I instinctively roll but accidentally hurl myself into Lucy. She looks okay but I throw my arms over her and pull her into a small groove at the bottom of the tunnel. It’s hollowed out in the base of the tunnel and will protect us if the train falls from it’s tracks. I tuck her head under my shoulders and make sure my entire body covers hers.

  The explosion tears through the blast door. The sound is like nothing I have ever heard before. The metal tears like paper and the door screeches open as the train, as predicted, falls down into the tunnel. The gap we had crawled into shields us from the blow but not from the heat of the fire. Then silence. Nothing but the ringing in my ears. We made it. No sense sticking around though. I didn’t want to barely survive the dinosaurs, the explosion too, only to die in the resulting fire.