James Wittenbach - Worlds Apart 08

by Hellfire

  He then heard himself sounding like an idiot. “Oh, the city… it’s just hot, and crowded, and there’s this red glow… it’s like what they used to think Hell was like.” She laughed. “It’s exciting, though, isn’t it? Are you staying on the surface?” “My family has a suite at the Jeroboam Hotel, but we’re leaving tomorrow. Mom’s doing a cultural survey of some commune in the hardscape.” “Too bad…” she sang. “I was supposed to do a psych profile of one of the leaders of the MegaPlex, someone named Aunty Maim, for TyroCommander Lear. Don’t tell anyone this, but I kind of half-assed it.” She laughed.

  He had laughed, too, and hoped it didn’t come across too forced. “Since when does TyroCommander Lear care about anyone else’s opinion?” He was kind of proud that he came up with something half-intelligent to say.

  “Exactly… Nice piloting, by the way,” she told him, taking another sip of the red liquid she was consuming.

  “What?”

  “I was in PC-1 with you when the StarLock was firing on us. I was out for most of it, but everybody says …” She was interrupted when her Johnny Rook, came over to them. “Hey, aren’t you supposed to be dancing with me?” he said to her, oblivious to Atlantic.

  “You left,” she told him poutily.

  “I had to use the euphemism. It was nauseous. Some sparkly dude with no hair wanted me to sodomize him. Give me that.” He snatched her drink from her and handed it to Atlantic, saying, “You should toss that out, it’s not good for you.” Brainiacsdaughter looked pouty just a second, then something on the dance floor caught her eye.

  “Oh, they’re doing the Pelvic Thrust. Let’s dance.” She took Rook by the arm and dragged him back into the disco. Atlantic quickly lost them on in the throng on the dance floor.

  He heard someone calling him, “Kyle!”

  “Kyle!” Aramburuzabala hissed at him in the dark. She had crossed the floor to him and was on her knees, shaking him with her good arm. “Did you hear that?” “What?” Kyle stammered. Until she had interrupted the music, he had heard nothing.

  And still, the night seemed silent around them, save the distant chirping and whirrup noises of the planet’s native insect species.

  Atlantic heard nothing else for several seconds, then a minute, then two went by. He was about to challenge her again, when a horrible roar started up. It seemed far away, but it was so loud, and so modulated that it vibrated the roof of their shelter.

  When it stopped, Aramburuzabala whispered. “There’s something out there?”

  “Really? Do you think so?” Atlantic whispered back.

  “See what it is,” she ordered him in a whisper.

  “Yeah, right!” he answered incredulously.

  “Climb the tower and see what it is,” she hissed at him. “I order you.”

  “You do it, captain,” he responded.

  She indicated her injured arm. “I can’t, remember? You have to see what it is.” Sighing, Atlantic put his hand on the first rung of the tall metal ladder that reached out of the shelter. He then looked up, saw the height of the thing from below. “It’s wet,” he said.

  “What if I fall?”

  “Just go!” Aramburuzabala ordered, pushing him up the ladder.

  Atlantic began to haul himself up one death-grip at a time. The rungs were still wet from the rain, and they stank of rust. As he climbed higher, the wind picked up and he could feel the tower sway. He would have had a flashback about climbing something perilous, but this was the first time he had done anything like this.

  Several long minutes of climbing brought him a little platform, below some pointy arrangements of metal and two concave dishes, one pointed sharply upward and the other pointed in such a way that its signal would probably be directed into the ocean a few kilometers offshore. Atlantic crawled onto the little platform and took in the scene.

  Another moon, smaller than the first, had risen in the sky. The light these two satellites gave was pale, but Atlantic had excellent night vision. He saw the island spread out before him, and he could see where its outline met the sea, but he saw nothing that would explain the noise.

  He was preparing to climb down again when a movement caught his eye. At first, he thought it was just wind blowing through the plant-life, but then he saw that there were two patterns, like trails, cutting through the jungle and converging.

  Something was moving through the trees. Something not much smaller and a whole lot faster than the trees was moving through the trees. He then saw another rustling trail converging with the first two and heard a terrible shrieking noise. It was unearthly, like some giant alien thing being tortured. The trails converged on it and a chorus of strange voices set to howling together. Their wails built to a crescendo.

  Atlantic felt the tower shake, vibrating sympathetically to the wailing of the beasts in the jungle. He began climbing down the tower as quickly as he could. He lost his slippery grip on one of the lower rungs and fell to the bottom, almost landing on Aramburuzabala.

  The horrible fear the wails had provoked was written on his face. “What is it?” Aramburuzabala asked him.

  “There’s some kind of monster out there,” Atlantic stammered.

  The Island - Day Two

  Pegasus would never find them. Atlantic was sure of it. They were searching the wrong era. They had crashed sixty million years ago. Maybe he could leave them a message, somehow, so they would know when, not where to look, and surely Lt. Cmdr. Alkema could come up with a way to find them through time, because he was so Allbeing-dammed clever…

  Then, he found himself in a jungle clearing, a perfect circle with snow covering the ground, the strange warm snow that existed only due to the climatic peculiarities of this planet. In the sky overhead were the three moons, but they looked like thin silver rings. Atlantic wondered with this was the trick of an eclipse, or whether the planet had three ring-shaped moons. He couldn’t remember, although he knew Alkema had talked to him about it.

  Then, a figure appeared in shadow and began floating toward him. The figure became Brainiacsdaughter, standing in the warm jungle snow wearing a warfighter’s tactical gear, but it was open down the from, showing the cleave of her breasts, the smooth skin of her belly, past her navel and down to her thighs. He could see drops of dew on her pubes.

  “I never really liked warfighters,” she whispered to him. “It was all a misunderstanding.” At that point, some noise drew his eyes up to the sky. An enormous spaceship was passing overhead, just a few hundred meters above the ground. It blotted out the sun and the sky. He could tell from its shape it was a Pathfinder Ship. To rescue them, Alkema must have ordered the ship into the atmosphere. But they were in trouble. He had flown too deep into the gravity well and they weren’t going to make it. The sound it made as it cut through the atmosphere was like the wailing of a monster, but it was getting smaller and smaller, shrinking and shrinking until it changed into an Accipiter, then spiraled down to crash on one of the cliff-tops.

  He snapped awake, and found himself eye level with Warfighter Shea Herrald’s bare reproductive organ.

  He screamed.“What the Hell! You’re naked!”

  “That’s right, I am,” Herrald answered, although he was still wearing boots. He flexed his muscles, showing how taut and naked they were.

  “Why are you naked?” Atlantic asked more specifically.

  “Some of us in the crew enjoy spending time naked,” Herrald told him. “It’s how I was planning to spend my shore leave. It’s perfectly natural, and there’s nothing erotic about it…

  well, actually there is quite a lot that’s erotic about it… but the point is, I’m naked and I’m loving it.”

  “Could you maybe not be naked around me?” Atlantic asked.

  “What, don’t you like Little Herrald?” He began oscillating his mid-section. “C’mon, shake hands with the Little Herrald. Why don’t you like Little Herrald? Little Herrald likes you.” “Stop it!” Atlantic snapped.

  Aramburuzabala roused
from her sleep about this time, and looked up at Warfighter Herrald. “Where have you been?” she demanded in a tone of voice that suggested she was still hacked off from last night’s obscene exiting gesture.

  “Exploring,” Herrald answered.

  “Did you see any… monsters?” Atlantic asked.

  “Have you seen any sign of the doctor?” Aramburuzabala asked before he could answer Atlantic’s question. Herrald’s nakedness had no effect on her.

  “Not a one,” Herrald reported.

  “Where’s Savagewood?” Aramburuzabala asked.

  “He’s still in the jungle, tracking a boar,” Herrald reported. “It’s like a boar, anyway.

  Except with tentacles on its face.”

  “Have you met with any other survivors?” Aramburuzubala asked.

  “None,” Herrald answered.

  Aramburuzabala sighed. “We have to keep searching. We’ll follow the beach around the island. We should hang a parafoil on the tower. Hopefully, it will draw any other survivors to it, or Doctor Skinner.” Herrald had news for her. “I’ve been scouting the trails ahead. About two kilometers beyond this point, there’s a spot where the beach will become impassable, a drop-off. I can show you to a trail that will take you ‘round it.” “Stop playing with yourself!” Atlantic demanded.

  “We’ll meet you outside,” Aramburuzabala said to Atlantic. “And do Atlantic a favor and stop touching yourself.”

  Herrald smirked as he left. Atlantic rose, the gnawing hunger inside his gut reminded him he had not eaten in a day. Even porcine face-tentacles sounded almost appetizing.

  As he left the shelter, he noted that if he had seen it in daylight, he probably would have kept out of it. It was a rusted-out metal shed already in the process of being overtaken by jungle rot and rust. He was surprised it had even survived the rain. He could have kicked it over.

  By mid-morning, Atlantic, Herrald, and Aramburuzabala reached the point two kilometers up on the beach. It was just as Herrald had described it, a sheer drop-off to the water surrounded by thick turquoise and chartreuse jungle vegetation. Herrald had tied a strip of his shirt on a tree trunk to mark the trail into the jungle.

  “So, now what?” Atlantic asked.

  “We take the trail,” Aramburuzabala said.

  “Shouldn’t the rescue ships have been here by now?” Atlantic asked.

  “Aye, they should have been,” Aramburuzabala agreed. “Even without a distress signal, Pegasus should have sent search and rescue crews hours ago.” “So, why aren’t they?” Atlantic asked.

  “I don’t know,” she seemed to have achieved a sort of acceptance that rescue would not be coming. “Which makes it the more imperative that we find any other survivors.” Maybe it was the hunger, and the fear of what might lurk in the jungle, but Atlantic was drawn to a darker prospect. “Maybe they rescued the others and left us here.” “We haven’t seen any ships,” Aramburuzabala argued. “To rescue the others, they would have done a standard search and rescue pattern. We would have seen them.

  Something’s wrong.”

  “Maybe something happened to them,” Atlantic suggested. “Maybe there was an attack. Maybe whatever took us down destroyed Pegasus.” “Or maybe we passed through some kind of space-time warp and ended up in a completely different era of this planet’s history,” Aramburuzabala challenged him back.

  “Oh, yeah, that’s likely.” Atlantic rolled his eyes.

  Aramburuzabala finished. “The point is, we can not waste time speculating on what we can not know. We have to focus on finding the others.” Defiantly, Herrald slapped his own butt cheek, “You can follow that trail around the island. I’m going back into the jungle. I’ll try and find Savagewood.” “And maybe your clothes,” Atlantic suggested.

  “Yeah, whatever,” Herrald turned and made his way toward the jungle.

  Atlantic started down the other trail with Aramburuzabala. It was still muddy from yesterday’s rains, and clouds of tiny insects rose from the surrounding bushes and trees as they walked by. They didn’t sting, but were so tiny it was hard not to breathe them in, and they created a nuisance.

  “I’ve been going over the crash in my head,” Aramburuzabala said after a while. “There was no indication of any problem before the ship broke apart. None.” Atlantic grunted in acknowledgment, but he wasn’t really listening to her.

  “I don’t think it’s anything you did,” she emphasized, although Atlantic had never even considered that it could have been something he had done. Atlantic pushed an oily blue vine out of the way – carefully, because he had found out earlier that the oil on the branch gave him a nasty burning rash – and continued along the path.

  “Hear me out,” she continued, as though he had a choice. “The first possibility is that something destabilized the pseudo-gravity envelope around the ship, resulting in a shearing condition that tore us apart. However, self-induced gravitational shearing is something that has never happened in hundreds of years of gravity-based propulsion.

  “Alternately, it is possible that our main reactor malfunctioned, and caused the tritium fuel cells to explode. But if that happened, we probably would not be alive to talk about it.

  “So, that brings me to the next theory, which is that one of our Hammerheads detonated in the weapons bay, destroying the main fuselage, but saving us because the command module protection system ejected us when it detected the malfunction.

  “And if that happened,” she added darkly, “It was possibly the result of sabotage.” This got a slightly more attentive grunt out of Atlantic, but he was still elsewhere in his thoughts.

  Arambaruzubala continued. “Someone could have accessed our weapons bay and rigged one of the missiles to detonate. But who… and why? One of the passengers could have been the target, but which one… and why?” Atlantic roused from his self-absorption long enough to suggest, “There could be an Aurelian agent on the ship. Some people think that TyroCommander Redfire was replaced by an Aurelian replicant when…” Aramburuzabala chuckled. “Aurelians, feh. I’m not so sure about the Aurelians. I mean, isn’t it kind of strange that we encounter an enemy in the galaxy just powerful enough to be a threat to us, but not so powerful that they conquer us outright? Isn’t it funny how the Aurelians are just threatening enough to compel the surviving colonies to ally with us?” Atlantic could not believe what he was hearing. “Are you saying the Aurelians are fake?” “I’m not saying anything, I’m just raising questions,” she insisted. “But think about it.

  The Olympic Project sent out a hundred ships into the galaxy and they were never heard from again. And that was just about the time the Aurelians began moving into space. Is that a coincidence?” She continued to elaborate on the Centurion Order, the Shadow Cabinet, and the secret family links between the Keelers and the Lears. The more she did so, the more Atlantic tried to focus on following the path through the brush at the edge of the jungle.

  But the heat, the humidity, the hunger, and Aramburuzabala’s non-stop chatter was making him hate life.

  Flashback — “I hate life,” Atlantic muttered under his breath.

  From where he stood in the Solstice Garden the millistrati ultracrystal provided a view of the curving perimeter of the StarLock Chapultepec and the Pathfinder Ship Lexington Keeler, well along in its repairs, its command towers completely dismantled and its hull patched and smoothed, except for some of the larger scars.

  She was on that ship. And he ought to have been there with her . And he would be, except that…

  A loud shout interrupted his life-hating reverie. “You, boy, what day is it?” Commander Keeler asked. His nose was as red as an m-class sun. He obviously had a load on.

  “It’s Christ-Solstice Mass Day, sir,” Atlantic answered. As should have been obvious. Solstice Park was in winter-mode, with snow covering the grounds and pathways, red balls and white lights hanging in the trees. Little pink ducks decorated the pathways.

  “Ha ha! Christ-Solstice Mass Day! Then I
haven’t missed it. The Spirits have done it all in one night, Heaven be praised,” Keeler cried out joyously.

  Aye, the spirits have done it, all right, Atlantic thought.

  The Commander regarded him, a little unsteadily, “Listen, my lad, er, could you navigate a giant starship through the you-know-what … thing?” He pointed at Chapultepec.

  Atlantic was only a little puzzled. “It’s fairly straightforward navigation sir.” Keeler roared. “Ha! An intelligent boy! A remarkable boy!” “Is the Odyssey Project Directorate finally going to give you permission to jump to the Orion Quadrant.” Atlantic asked anxiously, for he was in no hurry for this to happen.

  “Probably not, probably not,” Keeler muttered, with no less a jolly tone in his voice than before. “It may take the sneaky genius of a feline to get past the guardian codes, unlock the Lock, shut down its defenses, and open a connection to a remote StarLock on the other side of the galaxy, but such things are possible, certain things are likely to happen before the advent of the new year.” The commander paused, “But, perhaps I have said too much, Tell me, do you know if the food supply core has anymore of those cloned mega-turkeys?” Atlantic asked, “The ones as big as me?”

  Keeler gave a hearty laugh. “Hee hee hee! The very same. What a delightful boy! It’s a pleasure to talk to ye. Yes, my buck!” Is he hitting on me? Atlantic wondered.

  Keeler handed him a data slip. “Go down, will ya? And tell ‘em to send it to David Alkema and his family on Deck 21. And, mind you, they’re not to know who paid for it.” “Za, commander, but they probably will know it was you.”

  “Make sure someone cooks it up properly for them. That so-called woman of his could carbonize cold smashed grains.” “Aye, commander,” Atlantic had said.

  Keeler laughed, “Ha ha! Tell me not to take my starship to the Orion Quadrant will they! Ha ha!

  And a merry Christ-Solstice Mass to you, my boy! A merry Christ-Solstice Mass to everybody! A happy New Year to all the galaxy. Whoo! Whoo! Hallooo!” Atlantic watched as the commander of Pegasus stumbled drunkenly down the pathway.