Kraken Orbital

by James Stubbs

  I can sense that she wants the conversation to end, even though I don’t. And as much as I’d like to spend the rest of my life, however short and soon to end it might be, staring at her, we need to find a way out of here. The plan was to call for the Russian Federation.

  That was what Kolt was bringing us here to do. Before he… went away. I guess, as I think about it and run my eyes across the walls of the room we pushed through into, that’s the best way that I can describe what happened to him. I don’t want to think of him as dead. Even though he might have been. But then again he might have been a figment of my imagination. As well might Lucy.

  I try to drown those thoughts as the dark room slowly became more visible as my eyes adjusted to what little ambient light there was. My headache was starting to fade too. I know I must have lost a lot of blood by falling over on the ice outside. But I feel ok now. I reach up and rub my open and uncovered palm across the brittle blood that has matted it’s way into my long hair. It hurts as I brush past it, sending another spark of pain around the front of my head.

  I have to keep looking back for her. Just to make sure that niggling voice in my head is wrong. The one that is telling me Kolt was never there, and that she isn’t here either. That our kiss was fake, dreamed up by my desperate imagination. I take my hand off the back of my head and make my way to the nearest wall.

  Just to touch something. Just to feel something. To remind myself how to feel, what the tips of my fingers could touch. And that soothed the voice in my head that was slowly starting to irritate me.

  The tunnel we used to get inside from the cold has led to the engineering section of the ship. As the light penetrated the backs of my eyes, the scale of the place slowly settled in.

  We had entered the broken ship into a cavernous and vast space. The Engine Bay. The room stretched high into the abyss above and even further to the same abyss below. But that engine. That hyper drive. That first breed.

  I lusted for it as I ran my open hands over the flame scarred engine case. As the dull light pressed further into my eyes, I could see more of the vast and cavernous space into which we had emerged. At least three storey’s in height, open plan in design, with metal walkways spiraling and interconnecting over head. Wrapped around the case of the first breed of hyper drive engine.

  Even though it was dead, even though the ship had perished in a war I know little about, I could feel it. I could feel the life breathed into the engine as I ran my hand over its cold and empty shell. I was getting giddy almost at the thought of it.

  This is where it all started. This is where the whole universe had opened up to the world. This is where those few brave pioneers took to the skies and raised up a fist to the stars.

  Most of the walkways above were broken or cracked. I could even hear them creak in the odd gust blown into the place through the tunnel we just crawled through. It was much warmer in here than it had been out there. But being warmer shouldn’t be confused with being warm. It was still really cold. It must have been a cooling vent. Like I had guessed. We had crawled into the engineering deck via a large hole but the pipe carried on, spiraling down a few levels and into the very core of the engine itself.

  I peered down, into the darkness, over the brittle and frosted metal railing to the core of the engine. Once upon a time, maybe not even that long ago, the ionized gasses swirling around the core would have washed this whole section in dazzling, ever changing colors of the whole spectrum. It was a shame. And it was sad, especially for me, seeing it dead like this.

  ‘So much for my plan.’ I whispered but Lucy must have heard. Though she had been silent for some time as I browsed the area, she came jogging over to my side. She laid a comforting hand on my left shoulder and almost cuddled me as she peered down into the dead ship’s core. I wanted to recoil. Like I did before, and retreat into my defensive shell, but I quickly remember that I decided to let whatever version of me that was die.

  I fought the reaction hard and just let her hold me. It felt wrong. But nice all the same.

  ‘What were you thinking?’ She asked softly into my ear. Not wanting to upset or embarrass me but out of curiosity. I wanted to hide the truth from her. I wanted to just not reply but I fought that reaction hard too. I had known my idea wouldn’t work. Not just because what Kolt had said about the state of the Kraken, but in knowing in myself that my idea had been informed more by fantasy than it had by anything else.

  ‘Oh… just some childish fantasy I guess.’ I admitted through a sigh, turned, and gazed into her eyes. I was going to leave out the rest. She chuckled playfully, adorably.

  ‘What?’ She persevered and I got the distant sense she was playfully toying with me.

  ‘That we could fly this broken old ship out of here.’ My dream after all. She didn’t reply even though I knew fine well she was fighting back the urge to mock me. She just smiled, and kept on smiling, and I was just happy to watch her.

  ‘I don’t think we can do that.’ She rubbed her hand gently back and forth over the arch of my back. Maybe she was lying. Another stray thought suggested. Maybe she was lying that she had no memory. She had battered me before, I remember very well, back at the mine. Now she was groping me and comforting me.

  Had I misjudged her that badly? I had no problem with her beating me though. A daily beating was a dead cert and I definitely preferred them from her. But maybe, just maybe, she had admired what I did. Maybe she came here to join me. Not to kill me, finish me off or take me back. Just maybe. But I doubt it.

  I can see it in her eyes. They’re open. Not open in the sense that she is looking out of them, but I mean an open book. Not being able to hold a stare would suggest to me that she was hiding something. But she looked at me softly and kept her eyes focused there as I turned to lean on the barrier side.

  I wish I could ask her. The old me might have. But I just have to leave it for a little longer.

  ‘Hey.’ I interjected. ‘Don’t knock it.’ I was talking about my idea. Or was it more a fantasy? ‘You can’t tell me it wouldn’t have been one hell of a ride to fire one of these up and blast it through space to wherever the hell we wanted to go?’ I smiled at her. It feels unnatural to smile. For reasons that should be obvious by now. But I fight through those reasons and do it anyway.

  She takes me by the hand and pulls me off the barrier a little. She then places her fingers around mine and we walk, hand in hand, more stroll, around the broken ship’s interior like we are taking the five dollar tour.

  ‘Where would you go?’ She asks me. I have to think about it for just a second but the answer is obvious when all other possibilities don’t match up.

  ‘I’d go home. See my Dad.’ I was waiting for her to ask why but she doesn’t. I guess the shortness of my sentences and answers gives away that I don’t want to talk about it.

  ‘You?’ I quickly ask in case she loses the ability to fight the urge to ask anyway.

  ‘I’d get good and lost.’ She doesn’t give anything else away and I’m not sure what she means. I’ll have to add that to the growing list of questions that I need to ask her later. When we’re better friends.

  Even though it would have been exhilarating to say the least to fly this old and battered icon of a time lost, it was nothing more than a pipe dream. I guess that means I’m out of ideas. Lucy seems happy. As we walk around the broken ship, she swings her hand up and down with mine clasped inside of hers. She is still smiling and I don’t know why. I still don’t know what to think of her. But I don’t want those questions in my mind right now.

  The niggling thought that she might be just like Kolt. Either dead, or just a figment of my own broken imagination. As much as I love her company right now, and as much as she is helping me to feel like a new man, we need to think of a way out. I need to admit that my ideas are sub par and that I need her help.

  ‘Any ideas on what we should do?’ I nervously ask her, and turn my shoulder gently so I can face her as we walk. Our boots clink off
the old and rusted metal barrier walkway. The sound rattles around the cavernous and dark space but we feel no fear. Even though we probably should.

  ‘I think we should just explore the ship. Maybe the answer will present itself.’ That makes sense. We might just need a little inspiration. And how better to get it than walk around an iconic structure such as this. She stops walking, leaves go of my hand, and the cold suddenly fills my palms where the warmth of her skin used to be.

  ‘Should we split up?’ She suggests, proud of herself and feeling no fear at the prospect. I wish I was the same. Just the thought of parting company has me silently terrified. But alas that’s another of those old reactions that I need to fight. I should listen to her. I’m not going to be afraid like I was before. I’m at least going to try.

  By chance we had stopped by a large door. The control mechanism must have been fried in the crash or the fire that followed because it was already slid ajar. The spinning lock, of the same design but an older model, to the ones that locked the doors of my rig, had long since been battered open by desperate survivors trying to get out of the burning wreck.

  Another thought occurs to me. Another stray. Where are all the bodies? I let it pass and not sink in. I don’t want to know the answer, so I don’t ask the question.

  ‘Yeah.’ I hope the hesitation doesn’t show too much in my voice but it probably does. Even though I know she will have picked up on it she says nothing out of kindness. ‘Why don’t you stay here and I’ll check out what’s behind that door?’ I bravely offer but she has already wandered over to the dark crack between the two sliding partitions.

  She is holding onto one door and poking her head into the dark space beyond. I guess she has the opposite idea.

  ‘No.’ She says calmly, but with a gentle smile, as she slides back thorough the door.

  ‘You love this thing.’ She continues. ‘Stay here and take a look at the engine, try to find out if there is anything left worth salvageable. I’ll go this way.’ She raises up onto her tip toes and pecks me lightly on the cheek as a goodbye then disappears before I even have the chance to protest. I might have pretended to protest at least.

  But I can’t say, not here in the honest confines of my own mind, that I would have disagreed with her. I did want to look over the engine. But there was something else I wanted to know. What happened to Kolt? He must have worked here.

  Chapter 14

  Alone again

  She was gone so fast. And even though I haven’t known her for long at all, I already miss her and feel empty without her. Does that mean I was wrong? Does it mean she is real? If my mind had dreamed her from nothing, nothing other than my memory of her as a guard back at the mine, then why would she leave? If she was a product of my dismembered and lonely, anguish ridden imagination then she would still be here saving my pathetic self.

  But there is something else I need to ask myself. Something about her that has me off balance. It doesn’t seem right with me. Never before in my life has a girl propositioned me with a kiss out of the blue. Why would she? If she really has lost most of her memory then why would she just go and do that? I’m no oil painting. I know that. Especially not now, looking as I do, like I’ve been dragged backwards through hell twice. So maybe she is lying. Maybe she does remember me and secretly liked me as much as I did her. But my own self doubt turns that away immediately as an explanation.

  So I guess I have to just take her at her world this far. She is lost. She has lost her memory and is willing to just go with the flow of things. Maybe she’s given up and just isn’t showing it. This world is desperate and it does sap the life out of you. Maybe she’s the same in that sense. And I guess in the face of death, you take what you can get. That’s a little shallow, I know. But it’s all I’ve got at this moment in time. But I do believe in my heart that she’s real. So at least there’s that.

  I try to focus on that and drag my eyes slowly away from the gap in the cold and static metal blast doors that she had slipped through. I try one last time to peer back through the gap after her. But it’s too dark. A part of me, a much larger part than I would like to admit, wants to call her name just so that she will come back. But I need to buck up my ideas and allay my fears.

  I can do this. I need to check out this area. I’m supposed to be looking for anything that might help us to get out of here but that’s a distant second on my list of priorities.

  The engine deck is shaped like a tall, towering and cavernous tube that reaches through many sections of the ship. I don’t have to see it, even though I can, to know what it would have looked like in full light and strength. I can just imagine it. I can picture it from the schematics that I poured over, like the nerd I used to be, or might even still be, in my bedroom back at home.

  I cast my eyes up and down, trying to make out the shapes of the dark reaches above and below. I can see, now that Lucy is gone and I have nothing else to look at, that the spiral staircase running around the outer shell of the tube is cracked and broken. It reaches down into depths beyond the power of my sight.

  Even though it is in runs I am certain that I can make it over them and get down safely. I am sure, unless my memory is gone, that the control panels and the like are down at the far bottom. That was where I would look for any sign of Kolt.

  I need to know if he was real. If he was a ghost or an apparition. A fictional character that my mind called upon to get me through a horrid experience, or if he really perished here in this ship many years ago. I don’t care about getting off this planet. Not right now. My mind is hungry for answers and I can’t keep denying it of them.

  So I guess that I need to go and check out the rest of the engine room. As I cast my eyes over from one end and to the other, I listen with as much concentration as I can. The ringing in my ears, caused by my latest fall, still hasn’t gone away and it’s starting to annoy me. I’m trying to listen to anything lurking in the silence and the constant e-sharp tone in my ear won’t go away so that I can.

  I should really give myself a break. I’ve been through a lot and I don’t mean that to sound like I want some sympathy, even if it would only be from myself. I haven’t slept in what feels like days and I’m loosing concentration fast. But I need to keep going. I need to keep pushing and trying to find that next level, that last drop of power in the well spring of my mind.

  With a deep sight I turn to the metal railing that runs all along the walkway. The one we emerged onto from the exhaust vent. I can see the way down but it is shrouded in darkness. Not just dark in the sense that the light, what little there is, cannot break through far enough. It’s almost like a dark fog. Like a smoke. And then there is that smell again. The feint, tantalizing and mystifying yet comforting smell of old fires and log burners.

  The dark that shrouds the levels below is volumetric. Not just a veil but a choking mist. I sigh again. Without meaning to. I promised myself that this would be a line in the sand. That I would forget whoever I was before all of this.

  The short tempered and short fused, and let’s face it, ass that I think I am. The guy who can’t even crack a smile at a familiar face. Who can’t even thank a stranger for their help. My heart sinks as I remember the way Kolt virtually dragged me this far. And I suddenly realize but only now that I never thanked him. Not properly. Before he went away.

  So that means I have to keep going. Past that mist and mystifying darkness. Because I owe him at least the effort of finding out what happened to him. Maybe that would give him closure. Of course, all assuming that he was real, or ever was real.

  ‘Come on Parker.’ I say under my breath with yet another unplanned and unsolicited sigh. A shrug lightly of the shoulders. And I make my first step towards the staircase that runs along the outer side of the cylindrical room.

  My footsteps bounce off every wall as the metal of the walkway creaks and groans beneath my weight. The bolts scream in protest, the ones that secure the structure at every wall, as I make my way lightly to the f
irst step.

  As I bravely enter the mist it comforts me in a way that I never thought that it would. It wraps itself around me like a blanket in the night and warms me. I relax and continue to step down one at a time. The bolts don’t screech any more and the walls don’t cry anymore for a past glory that is no more.

  I’m more than a little surprised that I can hear voices coming from the distance. And even though my heart immediately starts racing in protest, I quicken my pace towards those voices. Because I recognize at least on of them.

  As my feet race at a volume my heart is not comfortable with, the mist recedes and the light from behind it peels away. The structure around me looks as new and I can see men hurriedly going about their work below.

  I can see uniformed and disciplined men sat at terminals while others rush from one desk and to the other with instructions and orders. I can see they are in crisis mode. Once the darkened mist that once shrouded and comforted me dissipates I can hear the alarms. And feel the fury of the flames.

  I must be dreaming. I want to rub my eyes, to kick myself, to pinch my own arm or something else that you might expect. But I’m frozen to the spot. In admiration. In despair. I’m not sure which or even if that’s it.

  Because I can see Kolt standing there in the middle of it all. Tall, as I knew him, and with his shoulders pinned back in pride. He was an officer on board the ship and he was going down with it. I could sense the panic in the room, but I could not feel it. Even though it would seem that the events, the events I assume that ended the life of this Kraken and of all those on board, seemed to be unfolding before me.

  I feel distanced from them. Like some safely guarded part of my mind knew that it was wrong. That it couldn’t be. That I must be hallucinating or in some other dream like state. I can see the ship falling from the embrace of deep space. I can feel it falling desperately, on fire and burning as it falls, through the atmosphere of the planet on which it came to rest, the surface of which I must still be stood upon.