The Icarus Void
Page 36
″Yeah. He thought he was fixing everything. Turns out he was breaking the whole ship into pieces. Sensors, shield integrity, everything that went wrong with ship's systems was because of Mac. He had no idea, not even at the end.″
″God damn.″ Markov shook his head. ″Anything else I should know about?″
″Not really, sir. Even if we take a full day to get to Outpost 12, considering the small size of the Boat we've plenty of air and provisions on board for the three of us. Should be smooth sailing from here on out.″ He smiled. He felt good. He felt guilty for feeling this good, considering what they'd gone through to get here, but god damn if it wasn't a relief to be on the way home.
Markov looked strange. He raised an eyebrow. ″What did you say?″
Straub kept smiling, but he felt uneasy. There was something about the way that Markov was staring at him. ″I said that it should be smooth sailing. There's plenty of provisions for the three of us, Captain. We'll be fine.″
Markov stood there for a moment, staring at him fixedly. Then he took a long, deep breath, and pointed towards the back. ″Straub, I need you to tell me who's back there. Please.″
Now Straub was confused. He swiveled the pilot's chair around and looked into the rear compartment: the only person back there was Laguardia, strapped down and still out cold. ″Sir, it's just Laguardia. There's no one else back there.″
He turned around and saw that Markov was holding a plasma scalpel in his hand. It was lit.
Straub looked up at the captain. ″Sir?″
Markov shook his head. ″I'm real sorry you said that, son.″
He raised the scalpel.
---June 6th, 2011.
###
Author's Note.
Writers write. That's what they do if they want to write, and that's something that I learned the hard way. If I wanted to write a novel, I had to get up off my lazy ass (metaphorically; writers sit to write, unless they're crazy like Hemingway) and actually write the damn thing. So I did. I wrote a little novel called a ruthless echo. Once I was finished I knew the book was imperfect and would need a lot of editing and work, and while it will one day come out in the form I want it to, I knew it wasn't ready to be my first published novel. Still, the need to write was burning like a bonfire, and so I wondered, Now what? I mean, I'd finally done it, I'd actually written that damn novel that had been wanting to be writ since my days as a young kid, but once it was done I was faced with that damn question of What do I do now?
The answer would be The Icarus Void.
I'm not entirely sure where the idea came from or how it came to be so clearly defined in my mind from point one, but I know it stems from a childhood of science fiction and horror strewn about the television viewing in my father's den, which leads me to the ultimate point of this note: that my father is entirely to blame for this novel, hence the reason it is dedicated to him. It all started innocently with Star Trek reruns on TV, and evolved with the advent of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which of course led to Deep Space Nine and Voyager. Our joint watchings of the Trek series petered out with the advent of Enterprise (which in my mind doesn't really count in the Trek realm of being, but I digress), but it was reborn when J.J. Abrams's Star Trek blew into the theaters. I remember that viewing and that day and I'm wondering if that's how sci-fi really started getting back into my brain after such a long time of me studying the nuances of horror. Dario Argento and Hideo Nakata took a back seat for two hours plus so that Captain Kirk and Mister Spock could do their thing in the glorious tradition of Wagon Train In Space. And if you don't understand that reference then you don't know your Trek history and I pity you, I really do.
But growing up, sci-fi wasn't always Trek and Picard and the Borg (but they would also contribute to my sci-fi understandings and lexicon) but also Ellen Ripley and the Alien films, and Starship Troopers and Terminator and The X-Files and Sphere and Resident Evil. Video games slipped in there too, but the TV was always on at my house, and while my mom tried her damndest to step in and keep my innocent eyes from viewing the nature of the beast, I got in there and tried to view everything I could. Sci-fi mixed with the dealings of the dark would come with The X-Files and I found myself leaning away from spaceships and uniforms and more into the paranormal and the unknown. But before X-Files my strongest association with sci-fi and horror mixed was Aliens, and how every time we watched it together (Dad and I viewed that film multiple times) my dad made a point to reach out and make me jump during all the tense moments. I hated it. I loved it. So it was. Eventually, after too many soldiers-blow-up-aliens-blockbusters, I relegated sci-fi horror into the niche of soldiers-blow-up-aliens. Remember Doom? Not the game, the movie. Yeah. Too many of those ″awesome″ knockoffs.
But eventually video games evolved to the point where a little gem titled Dead Space slipped into my radar and suddenly the world of sci-fi was terrifying again. I've never been much a fan for zombies, but they were alien parasite zombies that moved fast and jumped out when you least expected. Fantastic. Tension and terror realigned with technology and suddenly I was looking at sci-fi horror in a new light all over again. So when I finished a ruthless echo and I was waiting for feedback from people who were reading it, I needed to do something to take my mind off of it and the idea of an engineer slowly taking apart his ship while under the influence of alien hallucinogens crept in and wouldn't let go. A few weeks later I wrote the opening sentence of this book and before I knew it, it was done. Tweaks here and there notwithstanding, what you've just read is how it came out. Fully formed and ready to grow and take root, just like the best of sci-fi horror's most frightening beasts. And there have been quite a few.
Still, while there's a number of people who I should acknowledge in the creation of this book, there's really only my father that I'm going to direct thanks towards, because at the end of it all this book is his and his alone. He put the fear in me, he put the wonder in me, and this seeding now hatched and flailing about like a baby xenomorph is in a way just as much his baby as it is mine: the product of years of viewing and absorbing the best that sci-fi and horror had to offer, and in a way this is my love letter to the old man. Thanks, Dad. This one is all yours.
--CKB
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Table of Contents
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIV.
CHAPTER XV.
CHAPTER XVI.
CHAPTER XVII.