Pendulum: An Aes Sidhe Novel

by A. Omukai

  Except, things were never that easy. Just when she thought she had finally reached her destination, the pain in her chest reminded her she needed medical attention.

  She couldn’t call the Wisp down here into the grotto, but she wouldn’t have to, anyway. There was no need to perform the ritual right now. Even if she wanted, this was not how things worked. She would return to the vehicle, see if the med unit of the Wisp could deal with her cough, and get in touch with the transporter, or even the Tuatha De Danann. Whether she would open the gate depended on whether this planet was fit for colonisation, which was something she wouldn’t judge herself, anyway. That was the job of the xenobiologist once he came back from the ship.

  She still wanted to see if she could get in touch with Cailean. It bugged her that she could not call him. Something was wrong, and she needed to find out what it was.

  She turned around to leave the grotto, but took one last look at the monolith. It was completely black and absolutely smooth. It didn’t seem natural to her, more like an industrial product, left behind by someone for an unknown reason. She had no basis for this, just a hunch. In the end, it didn’t make a difference. There was nobody here to claim this place, the monolith, or the immense well of magical power.

  This really was a place of power if there was one, finally, which made all the misfortune of the last few days entirely worth it. When she turned around to look for the exit, she noticed cloud chasers hanging in the air, just below the ceiling. Eight of them, forming their usual perfect hexagram. She raised an eyebrow. What did they do here? She had suspected them to be outside, near the mushroom forests, where she had seen them the first few times. Encountering them again inside this closed space was a surprise. They lingered completely silently.

  “What are you guys doing here?”

  She didn’t expect an answer, but she sensed something touching her, like a voice in her head, only that this was not something articulated so she could understand. It was just a sensation she couldn’t describe. But something was there, for sure.

  “Did you just try to talk with me?”

  What was the meaning, if there was any? If it was even real.

  “Can you see them, too?”

  The Aes Sidhe nodded.

  Deirdre lay her back in her neck, staring upward, to the eight lights.

  “I need to use this place, to help my people travel here, to make this our new home.”

  Another reaction.

  Slowly, she realised that this was not just her imagination. It was real, and the source for this strange form of communication had to be the cloud chasers. There was just nothing else around here, apart from the stone, and stones didn’t talk, unless you were drunk. The mushrooms would hardly talk to her either, and if they did, she’d be very surprised. She chuckled.

  She felt the hand of the marine on her shoulder.

  As if to answer her thoughts, the cloud chasers drifted closer to her, until they were right above her head, near the ceiling. The hexagon formed, circled slowly around its axis.

  “Are you trying to tell me something?”

  She couldn’t interpret the sensation in her head, no matter how hard she tried. She exploded into a cough, and her chest throbbed.

  The pain was still not terrible, but certainly already strong enough to distract her. Yes, she definitely needed to treat this one first, or she wouldn’t be able to focus on her ritual. She had to wait for Adams, anyway. Deirdre didn’t know yet when he would come back, and she hoped the Wisp had sufficient equipment to deal with her lung, whatever was wrong with it.

  She started in the direction she had come from, careful not to put too much weight on her hurt leg, and left the cloud chasers behind. The pain was now slowly getting worse. Although, at this rate, she’d probably make it out of the grotto in time and could rest outside until the Wisp arrived.

  The cloud chasers didn’t follow her. They stayed exactly where they were, motionless except for their rotation, as if they were the guardians of this place.

  Maybe they were.

  19

  Explosion

  Adams shut the door of the locker and bowed down to check his bags. There still were some pieces of gear he’d need when he’d get back to the planet, but for now, he would go down to the canteen and get something to eat. This had been a long day, part of which he had spent in the sickbay. They had scrutinized him, and all the luggage he had brought back from the surface. The whole med staff was on high alert.

  Doc Maon’s health had deteriorated rapidly. High fever ravaged his body, and a fungal infection spread through his body at a speed that was more than worrying.

  Adams knew little about the state the Fir Bolg was in. Maon hadn’t been able to speak much without his words being interrupted by brutal coughs, and the medical crew didn’t inform him. Seeing the giant of a man look so brittle had been a shock, though. Adams could be glad he hadn’t been infected himself. He’d probably already be dead. How about the two women down on the surface? There had been no calls yet, to his knowledge. Surely they would get in touch if either of them got sick.

  The sound of a distant explosion reached Adams’ ear, and the ground below his feet vibrated a little. What had this been?

  Getting to the bridge for more information would take a bit of time. The barely restored labs lay on the opposite side of Deck Two, and part of the corridor was still exposed to space. He wasn’t part of the command crew, so whatever had gone wrong, he would be among the last to find out, unless he made his way over to the bridge in person.

  He dropped the small adapter he had held back into the box he had dragged out of the locker. It wouldn’t be necessary to bring a redundant one, anyway.

  The xenobiologist grabbed the two bags he had packed full of small parts and pieces, and got on his way.

  “Doctor Adams, good thinking. I was about to call you over the ship comm.”

  The captain walked through the bridge and welcomed him at the door.

  “What happened?”

  “We had an explosion, as you may have heard. Your surface mission is postponed for now, while we work on-“

  “Postponed? But the druid- “Adams stopped himself when he realized he had interrupted the captain, but Thornhill didn’t seem to mind, or maybe he hadn’t realized it himself.

  “Yes, yes. I know. The explosion you heard was in the hangar. Two technicians working on one lifeboat got killed in the accident. The detonation ripped open the outer wall of the hangar, and everything inside got blown out, including the transport boat, despite security clamps.”

  “Oh, sh…”

  Thornhill smiled a grim smile.

  “Shit, indeed. We lost the transporter, the lifeboat, three wrecked boats we were cannibalising for parts, and, worst of all, two of our crew. That drives the number of casualties up to eighteen, which is eighteen percent of the Tuatha De Danann’s crew.”

  “Plus the druid and the marine on the surface, if we can’t get them back on board,” Adams added.

  “That’s a genuine possibility. However, we’re working on a solution, but it will take time.”

  The two men reached the captains’s seat, but Thornhill didn’t sit down.

  “What are we going to do now?”

  “Are you able to do your research here on board, or do you have to get back to the planet to decide whether it can be declared viable?”

  Adams thought for a moment. They hadn’t seen the entire planet yet, only part of it, and only for a short time, on a surface level.

  “I’m not sure about that. There’re things I have to find out, and I might do so if I can get help from the scanners of the TDD. I don’t have a functioning laboratory, and I might need additional samples.”

  The captain nodded.

  “Whatever help you might need, you’ll get it. Do what you can from here, while we do what we can to get you back on the planet.”

  Whether this would be enough, Adams couldn’t tell yet, but it was a plan, and bette
r than nothing. He nodded, then showed the captain a salute, even though he was a civilian. It seemed appropriate.

  20

  Examination

  It took the Wisp way too long to find a path down to their position. The vehicle had been too big to follow her, and while it could hover over the ground, and possibly over water, too, it was not an aircraft, so Deirdre had taken no risks. She needed it here, especially since the medical equipment was important now. How a slight cough had turned into something that hurt like a motherfucker, she had no clue, probably some sort of infection, but she couldn’t do anything about it now.

  Time crept by slowly. Seconds turned to minutes, minutes to hours in her mind. No progress of time was visible in the night sky, which would stay in its current dark state for — she checked — about a hundred more hours. Now that she was sitting on a rock, the pain in her chest had faded away. All the while, her body temperature had climbed up slowly. 38.4C now. Strange, she didn’t feel feverish. Maybe her suit wasn’t in perfect condition. Malfunctioning suit or high fever, pick your poison. She laughed, and her voice sounded hoarse inside the helmet.

  “How do you feel?”

  “I’m okay. Suit says I got heightened temperature, but it’s not a fever yet.”

  “The doctor was coughing, too, when he left the planet.”

  “You think I caught it from him?”

  The marine shrugged. “I’m not an expert.”

  That they had in common.

  That grotto though had been a jackpot. The amount of power in the ground of that island had been overwhelming. She didn’t have to get into a trance to feel it, and she had a feeling that, no matter how deep she’d drive her roots into the soil, she’d not reach its source. The flow of magic inside there had felt like cool water running over her skin. The thought of water made her notice how thirsty she was. Nothing to drink in her suit. It wasn’t designed for long walks through. It didn’t even have a sanitary system. She giggled. If she pissed herself now, it would run into her legs and stay there until she’d get out of the suit. She’d run around with squeaky feet, like on that day when she was five, when she hadn’t got home for hours. It had been a hot summer day; she had felt thirsty, just like now, and it had been hot. It was hot now, too. Funny how memories from her childhood popped up when she least expected them. Maybe she felt the fever, after all.

  Her tail bone hurt again. Sitting on a hard rock for too long, with the planet’s gravity adding forty percent to her weight, didn’t go well with her bruise.

  Enough was enough. She stood up and held her breath, when both the hot daggers from her tailbone and the chest pain signals reached her brain at the same time. Tears ran down her cheeks. Not that anyone would judge her for it anyway, but she couldn’t wipe them away and clear her vision. At least these were only tears, not vomit. Ha, she was such a comedian tonight. What would happen if she vomited, anyway? She checked the time again. Over thirty minutes since she had given the Wisp its instructions.

  “Hurry the fuck up or I’ll sell you and buy a better car.”

  She checked, and her microphone was off. Good. That meant the Aes Sidhe hadn’t heard her. But the Wisp must have, because it suddenly shut down again. Deirdre waited patiently. Nothing she could do but wait even though she was in the mood to flip out, throw a tantrum and shake her fist at the clouds.

  She walked around along the water’s edge of the lake. If something was living in there, and it was big enough, hungry enough, and able to sense her, maybe armed with tentacles — nobody had ever accused her of lacking creativity.

  There, a signal from the Wisp systems back online. Good boy.

  At least the high gravity had helped a bit with those tears. Some water still clung to her eyelashes, but she had an almost clear vision again. There was something good in every bad situation, or it wouldn’t hurt to at least think so. Almost forty minutes now. She stumbled over a rock, caught her balance, only to slip on another. The jerky moves had reactivated the pain in both tail bone and chest, the tears were back, and now she didn’t even have a rock to sit down anymore. This planet seriously did its best to kill her. Or at least to remind her she wasn’t home. She was thirsty, and there was nobody in sight she could strangle or yell at. She wouldn’t take her chances with the marine.

  A sound directed her attention to her right, toward the slope she had descended earlier. There it was, reflecting the night sky even clearer than the water did, slowly gliding towards her. The Wisp. Finally.

  Deirdre wondered if the airlock procedure even still made sense, while the ventilation system sucked out the disinfectants, and replaced it with freshly filtered air. If Ailbhe was right, and she was infected, maybe she carried whatever had invaded her body right into the Wisp, contaminating it, endangering the marine. The inner airlock door opened, and she stumbled inside, moaning when both her contusion and her lungs acted up at the same time.

  “Don’t take off your helmet,” she said, the last word drowning in a wet cough.

  “I don’t think I must worry about it. My physiology is not even similar to yours.”

  “Could say the same about the doctor.”

  The Aes Sidhe nodded and left her helmet on. This wasn’t a suitable solution. She’d have to eat at some point.

  Deirdre needed a proper medical check, probably more than the Wisp could provide for her, but that was something she needed to have the diagnostic unit of the vehicle find out for her. She had no medical background, but maybe she would do a decent enough job at interpreting the data. But who was she kidding? The system would have to break it down for her.

  Now that she was inside, the Wisp’s system connected to her personal AI and synced its data. A system notification greeted her. She didn’t have the patience to deal with anything but her cough right now. But did she have a choice? Muttering, she opened the system message. It wasn’t so much a message as a media file, sent from the Tuatha De Danann. What could the mother ship want from her? She opened the file and directed the output to the Wisp’s bigger display.

  Fionnlagh’s face appeared in the centre of the screen, greeting her. Now that she saw him larger than in reality, she noticed that his left eye had been replaced with an implant, glowing in the same cyan his natural right eye did. Part of the left side of his face comprised synthetic skin, some areas of his face showed signs of burns. It had been impossible to see, with his tiny size and his rapid movements.

  The Lieutenant nodded at her, then moved to the side to give way to the face of Captain Thornhill, whose steel-blue eyes seemed to stare straight through her.

  “Lieutenant, I have bad news. We had an accident on board the Tuatha De Danann, and the transport boat that brought you is currently not available.”

  Deirdre jolted upright, ignoring her pain.

  “We’re working on a solution for this problem, but this means you’ll be on your own for a while — for the foreseeable future, in fact.”

  “You must be fucking kidding me,” she muttered under her breath.

  “Recovering the boat might take a while, depending on whether it’s even still functional. We assume it’s been damaged and needs repairs again.”

  Wonderful news, just what she needed to hear right now. But the recording wasn’t quite over yet, so she held back her anger for the moment.

  “Mister Adams is currently analysing the samples he took from the surface. Until we have results, we can’t tell if we can clear the planet for colonisation, and until we can tell, we can’t have you open the gate to Earth yet — if you found one of those places, that is.”

  She had indeed found one, and she knew how to open a gate, in theory. If she could do it in her current condition though was a different question. One that she didn’t dare ask herself just yet. Chances were, she wouldn’t like the answer.

  “Doctor Moan suffers from a fungal infection of his lungs. This is an alien organism, and according to the medical crew, we don’t have a cure for it yet. It’s a race against the clock.
Please let us know how you’re feeling immediately.”

  “Seems like it’s infectious after all,” Ailbhe said without looking at Deirdre. Her eyes stayed glued to the screen.

  They couldn’t treat it on board the Tuatha De Danann, and they couldn’t pick her up. Shit was going downhill fast.

  “Either way, your supplies should last you long enough for us to resolve our problems and send a boat to pick you up. These are bad news, for sure, but it can’t be helped right now. I ask that you wait for the results of the analysis and then proceed accordingly.”

  “Proceed accordingly,” she imitated the captain, clenching her fists, while her tail bone throbbed inside the suit she still hadn’t taken off.

  The message had ended here.

  Deirdre got up from the driver’s seat and limped over to the benches and the table. Remainders of her last meal were still on it. She hadn’t cleaned up before she had left the Wisp, but she didn’t feel guilty about it right now. She sat down the moment she reached the bench, then shook her head and stood up again, slowly, with shaky legs. Sweat formed on her forehead, and her head felt light, but she ignored the signs of weakness and took off her helmet, then opened her suit. She pulled her arms out of the upper part and let it glide on the bench. The marine helped her with the suit’s pants, and she sat down. She removed it first from her left, then her right leg, until she was free of the suit altogether. It would go into the cleaning tank, but she didn’t bother with this now. She had worn a complete set of clothing below the suit, which included not only pants but also a pair of tights. Why make things easy, if you could have them complicated? She sighed and got up a second time. This time, she didn’t have any problems, apart from the annoying throbbing that reminded her why she was doing what she was doing right now, but she would go through with this. She pulled down first her pants, then the tights, then plummeted back on the bench, unable to move or think or breathe for a moment that felt like forever.