Kraken Orbital

by James Stubbs

  I need to help Lucy make that last move. She’s probably stronger than me but I don’t think she is as tall. So the jump will be more daunting for her. I lay down in the crack and lower my hands down. As soon as she is close enough I tell her to jump. She doesn’t even hesitate. She must be able to trust me that much. That feels nice too. Her hands clasp into mine and I grip for my life and hers too. I pull hard and she does the same. She runs her boots up the wall and I unceremoniously grab at her belt and tug at it to pull her up beside me.

  ‘Thanks.’ She says but blushes. I know why. But say nothing. She shifted her pants back to normal and held onto me tight in the small space we found ourselves propped inside of. It was a tight squeeze and not too comfortable either. The metal shards that had been ripped asunder by the explosion dug into our backs. I slowly ease myself toward the open space behind me. Towards the other side of the tunnel. That’s the way we need to go and hopefully where we might find the escape pods.

  I slip. Lucy isn’t fast enough to catch me, and I push instinctively back against her to make sure she stayed on her feet and safe.

  I fall. So fast I don’t have time to think about it. So quickly that I don’t have time to try and save myself or even find the best landing spot. I hit the bottom of the dark hall and blacked out with the searing pain immediately. I hit the floor right on my back. Right where it hurt the most.

  ‘Sam! Sam!’ I awoke slowly and not so softly to the sound of my own name yelled again and again. It doesn’t take me long to recognize the voice as Lucy’s. I thought it had killed me. It feels like it had back on the rig when I first came to after the crash. It feels like it had in my dream too. Like I was dead. I can’t explain the relief that surges through me as I slowly open my eyes. It could have killed me. It should have too. So many times I had escaped a gruesome fate on this world. What was one more?

  Her voice is distant. It sounds distant, as you would expect any voice would when you awake from the wrong side of consciousness, but as I slowly open my eyes I can see that she hasn’t made the climb down yet. I mustn’t have been out for long. I want to call to her. Let her know I’m okay. Even though that’s a stretch of the truth in itself. But I can’t. It feels like my jaw is welded shut and I daren’t even draw in a deep breath for the sake of the ever present pain in my spine. Any small jolt might paralyze me. I’m lucky to have avoided it so far.

  ‘Hold on, I’m coming!’ I wish I could shout to her to be careful. I don’t want her to fall too. I was careless. Proud and pent up on my brief track record of success. I wasn’t paying attention. I messed up and now I’m paying for it. I can’t see her climb. It’s too dark and my eyes are too strained. I can hear the odd clunk and each one makes my heart flutter. I hope she is okay. And it frustrates me out of my mind that it’s all I can do.

  At least I can still feel my heartbeat. At least I can feel something. I wish I could move my toes or my legs or something but I can’t. I’m trying so hard to focus but I can’t. It fills me with dread and fear. My throat closes up and I can feel my tongue swell. My heart races and I can’t stop sweating. Is this is? Is this how it ends? All I can do is blindly trust in blind faith that it will pass. That I just haven’t recovered from the shock of the fall yet. The feeling will come back. It has to. It just has to.

  Before I even have time to process everything, I feel Lucy jump down from her last step of the climb and run over. I can feel it. The tremors through the floor when she jumped. That has to be good. She rushes to my side all a flutter and places two desperate open palms across my chest. And I can feel that too. Another lucky escape. Or is something else happening here?

  ‘Are… are you still alive?’ She sobs over me in floods of tears. But what a question. I have no idea. I really don’t.

  ‘My legs.’ I manage only two basic syllables. I want her to touch them. To run her hands over them so I can see if I have any sensation in them. Even though I can’t articulate it, she senses it anyway and does what I want.

  It’s hard through my armor to feel anything at all, let alone her soft and gentle hands. And it’s all to easy to think I can feel something but I really can’t. It’s too easy for our minds to play tricks on us like that. Kolt thought he was alive when he wasn’t. Let that be a true representation of how much power the mind has over our matter. Dead or alive. To convince itself that it can feel, that it still exists but exists no longer. But despite all of that, or maybe even in advocacy of it, I am certain that I can feel her caress my aching legs. And I can feel her teardrops slash gently against my hands.

  I don’t need her to be weak right now. I need her to be the strong girl I met out on that snowfield. I can’t move. No way can I stand. I like that she cries for me. I like that she cares about me enough to. But I need her to be the hard as nails guard I used to know. Or at least that I thought I knew.

  ‘Come on!’ Again she reads my thoughts and dries her eyes. I know how strong she is. I know she can carry me but I still have something left. I still have an insurmountable power of will. And I swear that even if it bleeds me dry I’m going to use it.

  I push her arms aside and roll onto my side. It hurts. Like a blistering heat mixed with an icy cold thrashing through my mortal frame. But I do it anyway. I growl against her advances and she backs away. And I stand up despite everything. Despite the crushing weight of defeat and death, in defiance of all of it, I stand on my own. Tears roll freely down my cheeks as I dig deeper and deeper to a power source I didn’t know that I had. And I’m proud. But it doesn’t last. It couldn’t have.

  I reach out to her side and fall limp onto her. She dutifully catches me and takes most of my weight. It’s a welcome respite. But I know what I have to do now. I know what’s happening here. I know I’m part of it. But there is still one thing that I have to do and there is nothing that is going to stop me.

  ‘Let’s get you out of here.’ I say, with both of my heavy arms wrapped around her sweaty neck.

  ‘I was just gonna say that to you.’ She sobbed but responded immediately.

  Chapter 22

  One Last Mission

  We slowly slip our way through the dark tunnel, with most of my weight pressed against her’s. My back is in agony. We can’t see more than a foot in front of us. But we pick our way carefully through the untouched industrial setting towards an unknown destination. This side of the tunnel has escaped most of the damage that I caused by blowing apart the other side. That’s good. It means the going isn’t as rough as I was expecting.

  My weight is still pressed against Lucy’s chest. It feels nice. Why am I such a sissy? Why do I need someone to take care of me like this?

  There I go again. Always was my own worst critic. Why do I need to be so hard on myself all of the time? I did okay! I had a good run. An argument rages inside of my head between the two opposing points of view as we slip and slide our way, me on barely useful legs, limp and useless, to the other disc of the ship.

  I did okay. That’s what I need to remember. I came here prepared to die. I had a good run. I stole the rig. I showed those guys they can’t bully people and get away with it. That no matter what happens, if you oppress a people, any people, for long enough they will rise against you to fight you. Even though I won’t ever get to see my Dad again, I think he would be proud that I was that guy. Not the one who just kept bending over and took it over and over again.

  I was the guy. I embellish myself with the floating fantasy that back at the mine there would be an uprising going on right now. I hope that it’s true. I can believe it. I think it might be true. Lucy came here to get away from them too. That meant there had to be more like us.

  So I don’t know why I am so hard on myself. But I guess, for want of a better or more complete explanation, it must be in my nature. And there really is no point in changing that now. Even though I’ve tried to be different since Kolt left me. Even though I’ve had to evolve because of what’s happening on this planet, for her, there is no point anymore in
digging up the power cables that keep me ticking.

  This is as good a note as any to go out on. I think silently to myself in such a way that I expect death.

  Lucy stops suddenly. I had floated off into my own world. I had forgotten how much of a strain I must be putting her under. I had forgotten to even try to move my legs. She must have dragged me all by herself for quite some time. That was selfish of me. I’ll try harder for the last push. I need to.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ She nurtures me to the ground, thinking of only me and not herself. That’s sweet of her. But I’m not going to feel sorry for myself. If this really is the end, if this is really how I go out, then I’m going out the strongest version of myself that I can ever be. She’s worth it.

  ‘I’m alright now.’ I lie. ‘I can walk the rest by myself, sorry you had to carry me.’ Another two successive lies. She just smiles and puts a soft hand on my knee. She looks me up and down with an undisguised concern upon her face. I can do this. But there is no point in stopping.

  ‘Let’s keep moving.’

  Time for that gargantuan effort. I roll onto my knees, feel my back crack in more than one place, and force it to stop hurting while I stand. I take my weight upon my brittle and tired legs, and slowly persuade one foot, I don’t care which, to take a baby step forward.

  ‘I can…’ I know what she is going to say so I stop her mid flow with just a politely raised hand and a pointed finger. I need to do this. For me. And for her.

  I’m amazed they keep listening, my legs that is. And that they keep moving despite my back howling in protest. It has to be broken somewhere. I can’t have been that lucky again and a again. The power of will and nothing more carries me forward into a thin light trickling towards us from an as yet unknown turn in the path ahead.

  Lucy is right here with me. Holding onto my hand sweetly but taking none of my weight. I look back but only briefly. My balance is all over and I can’t hold my neck in any one place but forward for long. I raise a salute. Lucy is looking down. Tears rolling down her soft cheeks. So she doesn’t see. And I whisper under my breath, only so that I say it, but she hears nothing. “Goodbye Kolt. See you on the other side my friend.”

  I don’t know what I meant. Or why I needed to. But it felt right. Grief has a way of messing with you and screwing you around like that. I just felt I needed to wish him farewell as I mounted the last leg of my journey. And gave the last morsel of power I have left inside of me to finishing it.

  We make it to the end of the dark tunnel and slide into a well lit room. Strangely and warmly well lit. In the soft, gentle, orange glow of a million candles. Candles placed around bodies wrapped and preserved in blankets and sheets.

  ‘Oh…’ Lucy whispers upon seeing them. The candles still burn, like the constantly burning man in the gas filled corridor, even though they must have been lit many countless years ago. They remain lit in a constant vigil to the dead they guarded.

  ‘Mass suicide.’ I conclude without a shadow of doubt in my voice. Lucy hurls herself towards me and cries softly into my chest. I cuddle her softly for comfort and bravely ignore the shooting pain it causes me to hold her as well as myself. The bodies lay there gone and lifeless upon the floor. Dumped, but not unceremoniously, in piles of ten or more. They were filled into a room as big as the distribution centre we had passed at the exact opposite side of the tunnel.

  Every last one of them had been shot through the skull. Blood drained out and remained to this day bright red and living about the heads of the mummified shapes. The sheets remained white for the most part. Not aged or worn by the ravages of time as you might expect. Virgin white and innocent like the victims they held.

  I don’t want to stay here long. I don’t want her to have to see this any more. I hate seeing her upset. I want her safe. So I whisper gently in her ear that everything would be okay. I even promised her. Even though I know I shouldn’t have. I take her weight, almost like I want it to hurt, like I want it to test the very pits of my will power, and half drag her through the corpses of hundreds of innocent dead. I am careful, for respect, of every footstep and every movement.

  I stop when I see the first one move. A single breath expands in the chest cavity of a single victim. I freeze to the spot and listen intensely as my heart races to my throat. I should have known. I should have known they hadn’t escaped the same fate. Once one started breathing, the next continued, followed in a chain until the room of bodies breathed together as one. Lucy clings tightly to me as we stand in frozen disbelief. One stands, casts their sheet aside, followed by the next and every one of them after that. The dead stand. The gruesome dead. And they walk.

  I hold her hand tight and pull her close to me. Fearing the worst.

  ‘I’ll get you out of this I swear.’ I whisper gently as the dead, the mass of dead, standing and lost, began to cry as one. An ear and earth shattering cry of the lost. The forever lost. They, like everyone who dies here, are cursed to relive their death over and over again. In a twisted purgatory between life and death. There are scientists, soldiers, civilians and children among the crying dead.

  They part like a wave. Like a rehearsed mass to opposite sides of the room. Soldiers to one side. Everyone else indiscriminately to the other. Leaving me and Lucy in the middle alone. I should run, if I could have even managed to do so, but I don’t. I want to see.

  Some sick and twisted desire inside of me driven by horrific curiosity demanded that I stay. That I give them farewell and take part in their death. I know what is about to happen. I can feel it in my blood. The soldiers, dead, at one side of the room raise antique guns identical to Kolt’s. The others, dead too, cower as one mass at the other side. The sounds of gunfire fills the room without the hot lead to accompany it. Like a play. A rehearsal or an act.

  The bullets that were no longer there tore through the brittle and terrified bodies huddled together. And the noise didn’t stop until every one of them had been killed yet again. A command yelled by someone unknown, in Russian so that I could not understand, and the soldiers turned their rifles around at the butt. With one explosion of sound they fell too. But stood immediately after. Bleeding as if the deed had only just been done, they crawled to their resting places, pulled the sheets back around their formerly dead bodies, and slept again until it was time to relive their own nightmare again.

  ‘Why did it happen?’ Lucy asked. It shocks me. Not that she cared to ask but more that she didn’t ask what I expected in the order I expected her to ask it. I thought she might have begun with “what’s happening” or something to the same effect.

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe they were just afraid. They didn’t understand.’ I try to console her as she gradually stopped crying.

  ‘Do you?’ I sigh at the proposition. I think I do know what’s going on. And I get the feeling that she does too. I just want her safe. I don’t want her to have to go through this.

  ‘Yeah.’ She smiles at me through shaking lips but says no more. I’m grateful for that. I don’t want to get into it. I want it over and done with at long last. ‘Let’s go.’

  We stumble together for a few steps as I work the stiffness from my back and take over the pace soon after. I pick the biggest of three doors in the room of the dead and make a direct heading for it. In the chaos that was the last act of the dead I had not noticed the sign on the door. It was the same everywhere. A basic figure of a man heading right for the exit, which in this case took on the form of a crudely drawn rocket ship. Chance had lent us another hand in that we were stumbling in the right direction.

  ‘I didn’t release that Gas.’ She announces out of the blue.

  ‘What?’ I’m not mad. Not at all.

  ‘I think it happened when the ship crashed. I didn’t press a thing I promise you. It just seems that now we’re here, the things that killed the poor people aboard the Kraken are coming back. Like the ship, or something in the core of this messed up planet, wants us to see how they died. Or it wants to rec
reate their deaths over and over again.’ There it was. She hit the same explanation, the same blood curdling and horrific theory I had arrived at in my hours of tramping around the planet on my own. It dawns on me right now that I haven’t even mentioned Kolt to her. Maybe it’s time I did.

  So I tell her everything. Like I probably should have from the start.

  ‘I was rescued from the burning rig that I stole by a man who called himself Private Kolter Gespenst.’ She perked up but didn’t interrupt me. The door I had been aiming for parted slowly once I presented my access card to it. It opened up into a room, small and cramped, full of blinking lights and computer screens and an air lock at the other side. ‘He half dragged me through the wilderness with promises of rescue. He planned on calling the Russian Federation using the masts onboard the Kraken.’ I can see the color drop from her face at the last sentence.

  ‘But the federation…’

  ‘I know.’ I sit down against a corner of one of the computer terminals without thinking of looking at what it was. ‘That was my first clue.’ No point in sugar coating the truth. Or at least what I thought was the truth. ‘He burst into flames when he saw the broken shell that used to be his ship. He said he had been pretending he was alive, assuming life, and hadn’t even realized he had died what must have been hundreds of years ago.’ Lucy visibly shivered and held her arms tight around her chest. She said nothing so I feel once more that I need to fill in the gaps. Those nervous gaps in a fledgling and young relationship.

  ‘I… should have told you, I’m sorry.’ She just shakes her head.

  ‘I’m scared.’ She admits but looks away from my eyes.

  ‘It’s okay.’ Here I go again. Filled with the bravado that’s carried me here so far. With the blind faith that I can save her. That I’ll do everything in my power to see her live through this. ‘I’ll find a way for you to be safe.’

  Spurred on my the rush of adrenaline my mind and body gifts to me I stand and start examining the flashing lights and nonsensical computer screens. Luck had carried us this far. But it had run out. I knew what these warning messages were. The symbol was the same everywhere, feared everywhere too, and had not been changed in countless years of space travel.