by Hellfire
He turned a corner and entered into one of the ship’s botany bays. This one was made of a large arboretum. The arboretum was so large, they had managed to fit three moons into it. They hung over his head. It was filled with tropical foliage. In the middle of it, Doc Skinner was holding his log, saying “I’ve got wood for Naked Herrald.” Atlantic snapped awake finding himself alone and tied to a tree. The sun had not quite risen, and the jungle was dark and shadowy. There were the bones and remnants of a roasted pig near the remains of a fire. This and the throbbing pain at the back of his head reassured him that the events of the previous night had not been a hallucination.
“Now, what?” was all he could think.
Atlantic spent the next hours being severely uncomfortable. His arms cramped. The bindings chafed into his wrists. The shade of the rocks and cool breezes over the nearby stream spared him the worst of the morning’s tropical heat, but clouds of tiny insects tormented him. He also dealt with terror that those flying black mites might coalesce into some horrific creature … again … and this time he would be helpless against it.
Heat, hunger, and boredom contrived to make him pass out before the sun had reached its noontime Zenith.
And he has an auditory dream in which voices whispered.
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He regained consciousness to find himself face down on the ground, tasting the dirt.
Someone was standing over him. He looked up and saw … Specialist Brainiacsdaughter. It was not much of a surprise to him. The rest of the cockpit crew had gone mad, why not he?
“If I’m a hallucination, who cut your ropes?” Specialist Brainiacsdaughter asked him, as though reading his thoughts.
Atlantic spit the dirt out of his mouth, thinking he was definitely insane now, and there was nothing left but to get a talking cat and take up drinking. He pushed himself up, there were friction burns around his wrists. He crawled over to the stream, and scooped up water in his mouth.
Specialist Brainiacsdaughter hovered over him as he drank. “What are you going to do next, Kyle?”
Atlantic finished drinking, then rose, and cast his eyes upward. “Climb that hill, get to that Accipiter, and try to COM Pegasus.” “Do you think that’s what the Allbeing wants you to do?” Brainiacsdaughter asked.
“What?” Atlantic asked.
“It won’t work,” she told him.
“Why not?”
“The flight controls and avionics are smashed, and the power cells are depleted,” she explained. “That ship isn’t what you think it is.”
“You think you know that, just because you’re a hallucination,” he snapped at her.
“The Allbeing has a plan for you, Kyle,” she told him. “The Allbeing has a plan for all of us.”
Turning away from her, he began to climb the first reach of the hill, a twenty meter (give or take) stretch of rock, a fairly easy climb, and footholds were abundant.
“Watch out for snakes,” Brainiacsdaughter warned him.
At that moment, Atlantic heard a hissing in the grass and saw a black and yellow hooded viper slithering away from the place his hand had just been.
More carefully now, he finished his climb to the top of the hill. When he reached the top, he turned around to see if his hallucination of Specialist Brainiacsdaughter had followed him, but it was no where to be seen.
The next part of the climb was harder. Even though the hill was not a sheer cliff, but more like a steep grade, it was thickly overgrown with native plant life, including a species of blue-green glass whose blades were sharp as razors. Atlantic’s hands were soon covered with small, stinging cuts.
Half a kilometer up from there, the grade flattened out, and there was a kind of trail, almost, leading up the hillside. Checking to see that he could keep the shiny metal of the Accipiter in sight, Atlantic began hiking up the trail.
Perhaps two or three hours had passed since he had left the camp. From the altitude of the hill, he could see most of this part of the island. And he could see, maybe eight or ten kilometers offshore, what looked like another island. If it was real, he thought the other survivors might be on it. He was sure he could reach it, swimming, and wished he had done so instead of climbing these hills.
He didn’t see the old log that lay across his path, and it was covered with thick sharp grass anyway. It caught his ankles and he face-planted.
Someone offered him a hand to help him up. He looked up and saw Specialist Brainiacsdaughter looking down on him… and smiling. “Help you up?” she asked, He reached out and took her hand. It fel
t warm and soft, and even kissed a little bit by the jungle dew. It worried to him how real the hallucination was becoming. Nevertheless, he allowed her to help him to his feet. Then, he continued hiking.
“Um…’Thank you?’” she prompted him.
“I still don’t believe you’re actually here,” Atlantic explained.
“That’s no excuse to be rude. I don’t believe I am actually here, either, so we’re even,” she said, taking his hand, and even if it was a hallucination, he was glad for her holding it. “I should be in a cargo locker on Lexington Keeler.” Atlantic remembered that Keeler’s Inhabitation decks had been completely destroyed in the Aurelian attack. “I thought you were supposed to have finished reconfiguring the cargo bays into living areas by now.” “It’s taking longer than we thought. With Ambassador Lear, everything takes longer than we thought. Careful!”
His foot slipped on some loose dirt. Her grip on his arm kept him from falling over.
“Thanks,” he said, this time.
“That’s better,” she replied.
He continued along the trail for a few more minutes, and finally he figured, what the hell, and he asked her, “Why did you leave Pegasus to go on Lexington Keeler?” She didn’t respond at first, and he thought she might have vanished again. Then, she asked him, “Why did you stay on Pegasus instead of following me?” It took him a few steps to formulate his reply, and he thought he was being honest as he said it. “I thought about leaving. If we had stayed at Chapultepec for another few days, I probably would have left Pegasus.” “Neg, you wouldn’t have.” She smiled sweetly. “Why didn’t you ever say anything to me about your attraction to me?”
“I thought you liked warfighters.”
“You thought wrong about that.” She squeezed his hand. “You never asked because you already knew what my answer would be.”
The Accipiter was now just ahead of them. He had not seen, from the ground, how covered in jungle debris it was. To his untrained eye, it seemed someone had made a deliberate effort to hide it, a long time ago. Most of the leaves and vines covering its hiding place had dried out, turning an indigo color as they died. Many of them had dried onto the skin of the Accipiter, and had to be scraped clean.
When he had dug through enough leaves to get to the canopy, Atlantic touched the release at the side of the ship, but it did not open.
“Like I told you, the energy cells are drained,” Brainiacsdaughter said.
“But we just crashed two days ago, those cells are good for …” he didn’t really know how long they were good for, but he guessed it was longer than two days. Instead, he pried the canopy open. It eventually released, and a puff of hot stale air exhaled when he opened it.
He yelped at the contents of the ship.
There was a skeleton on the control saddle.
Frozen for the moment, he stared into its empty eye-sockets. This pilot had been dead a long time.
“This was not one of your Accipiters,” Brainiacsdaughter observed.
“There’s no flight patch on his uniform,” Atlantic said. In fact, what he was wearing didn’t look like flight gear at all. It looked like some sort of one-piece coverall. Nothing on it provided name or rank of the deceased pilot. “If this isn’t our Accipiter, where did it come from?” Atlantic wondered.
He reached in and cautiously touched a few of the controls to see if anything in the ship still worked. Nothing. Then he noticed, just under the spot where the canopy sealed to the fuselage, a code was stenciled. ACX-110-231-OLY. “This came from the Pathfinder Ship Olympic,” Atlantic said out loud. “How did it end up here?” “How could I possibly know,” Brainiacsdaughter replied coyly.
He stuck his head deeper into the cockpit. He wanted to pull the Flight COM module from the control panel. It was dead, but if he could find an active power cell, he might be able to fashion a COM Link. He tugged at it, but it seemed stuck in place.
He felt the Accipiter shudder and slip underneath him.
“Be careful,” Brainiacsdaughter advised. “The ship is not very stable.”
“I have to get that COM unit,” he insisted, but he felt the slip slipping quickly now, over the side of the gorge, carrying him with it.
Flashback - “Inertial dampeners at maximum,” shouted Lieutenant Smith at operations. “But hull stress is still increasing.” “The ship will take it,” Lieutenant Commander Change insisted. “Mr. Atlantic, what is our position…” “110,000 meters above the surface… by reckoning.” As Pegasus descended into the atmosphere of the planet Yronwode, it had become enveloped by charged atmospheric particles. His instruments were blinded, and he was calculating their altitude by rate of descent and his own intuition.
“I would estimate closer to 105,000,” Change corrected.
Atlantic had tried to get her to choose another helmsman, to choose Powerhouse Jesus for this descent.
But she had refused to relieve him. Specialist Atlantic, junior helmsman, would be charged with taking a pathfinder ship into the atmosphere of a planet, something a pathfinder ship was manifestly not designed for.
“If he’s wrong, we’ll crash on the surface as be trapped on that gosh-forsaken heckhole forever,” Smith had protested.
“If you’re going to curse on my Bridge, use real curse words. I’ll be happy to give you some lessons.” Change growled at him, “I am sure Mr. Atlantic is competent to keep this ship flying.” But Kyle Atlantic was not sure. Beyond the rapidly diminishing force shields, the ship was enveloped in a burning ring of fire. And as the ship went down, the flames went higher.
Atlantic watched the Accipiter tumble down the side of the cliff and smash into the trees below as he hung on for dear life to a sapling growing at the side of the cliff. Weak with hunger, and pain, and heat, he knew he could not hold on for very long, let alone pull himself over the side. He also didn’t think his chances of surviving a fall or a slide down this cliff face were very good either.
Just when he thought he was going to lose his grip, a hand reached over the side.
If that’s a hallucination and I reach out for it I’m dead, he thought to himself.
He heard the voice of Specialist Brainiacsdaughter. “If you don’t grab it, you’re dead anyway unless you learn to fly in the next few seconds.” He reached for it. The arm and the hand were thin, but strong as carbon composite, and Atlantic was quickly hoisted over the side. He landed face-up on the grass, looking into the sun. A male figure in a cloak appeared in silhouette, leaning over him. “Greetings and salutations, Number 5. I trust you are not in too much distress.” “Number five?” Atlantic stammered. There was a very sharp pain in his left thigh. He felt a sharp piece of wood sticking out from the meat of his leg. A branch had impaled him as he fell from the cliff. He pulled it out. It hurt like hell.
“Yes, there were five people in the compartment of your ship that landed on the North Shore of the island, and you are the last of them. I call you Number 5. Let me help you up.” He extended a hand, and Atlantic took it.
Getting up, Atlantic took a good hard look at the man. He was thin, with white blond hair, and of indeterminate age. He wore spectacles with round silvery mirrored lenses that completely hid his eyes, also a long coat that was incongruous with the tropical climate.
“I suppose,” the man said, “that you are going to require food, water, attention to injuries, and all those other things humans require? Probably in that exact order?” “Aye,” Atlantic told him. “Oh, and thanks for pulling me up.”
“You are quite welcome. We should head back to the lab, and see what’s on the slab.
Old joke, but it would have knocked them out 5,000 years ago, I’ll tell you that. Walk this way,” he instructed, chuckling to himself.
Once you have gone completely insane, Atlantic decided, you may as well just follow your delusions, because you can’t tell what is real anyway. And for all he knew, he had gone over the cliff and died, and this was just one of those hallucinations you experience in the final
seconds of life. Perhaps the last three days had all been a hallucination and he had died in the crash. He had seen stories like that. Maybe this was one of them. He no longer cared.
The man led him away from the cliff and back into the trees, which were thinner at this elevation. Getting through them was not much worse than passing through a mountain glade.
And not far into the woods, they came upon a well-used trail that led to the notch between the pair of mountains in the middle of the island.
The man in the overcoat continued chatting amiably. “You haven’t asked my name yet, but that’s understandable. You’re a little self-absorbed, and probably think I’m a product of your delusional mind. Right?” “Aye,” Atlantic admitted.
The man nodded. “All right, go with that, then. If you decide you do need a name to refer to me by, you may call me Mr. Dolby.”
A Republicker name, Atlantic thought. Atlantic noted that he spoke with a distinct Republicker accent. If he had to guess, the man was from Sector 28 North, the Estuary region.
“Follow me closely, you don’t want to lost the trail,” the man warned Atlantic. “This trail I’m taking us on is a little hard to follow, but it will get us to the black stone pyramid before nightfall.” Flashback – Atlantic snapped alert, as though he had been daydreaming. “Sorry, ma’am?”
“Wake the hell up and lay in a course to the system coordinates Mr. Alkema just sent to you,” Change ordered. “I can do it myself if you’re preoccupied.” “Aye Ma’am, sorry ma’am.” He activated the helm interface, which grew over his left forearm and left eye. “I’m plotting a course around the debris field. Our ETA at the specified coordinates is approximately six hours, 61 minutes.” Change looked dissatisfied. “Negative, cut through the debris field. That will reduce our transit time to fewer than three hours.” Atlantic turned to her, an anxious look on his face. “Aye, ma’am… but that will take us… through the debris field.” “I know that,” she told him. “Not hitting anything will be your problem.” An hour and a half of hiking brought them to the cleft between the mountains. Here was located a six-tiered pyramid, so ancient the volcanic black stones of which it was constructed were crumbling and jungle vines covered its walls. “Don’t just stand there being impressed, Number 5. Come on in, I have a lot of questions for you.” The base of the pyramid was a verandah with a roof supported by pillars. Carved into the black volcanic stones were abstract faces, too oval and melon-like to be human. In the center of one side of the pyramid, sheltered by the overhanging roof, was a tunnel to the inside.
The tunnel was dark, and went on for quite some distance, gradually going deeper and deeper into the base.