They had widened the path through the sand further by then, but it was still a crawl to get in or out. It offered them a little protection from monsters and from water, but Charlie was very worried about getting buried alive inside of there. The ship was at the feet of the statues, and he had had to dig down through the sand for quite a ways in order to find it. They could have a very real problem in the morning if they weren’t lucky. He kept Avraam’s mace nearby, expecting to have to use it for digging.
Mew Tse fell asleep quickly and Charlie lay there in the dark for some time holding her tenderly. He wondered if they had been lovers in his previous life. When she had shown him an image to communicate that they were friends, she had chosen one in which it looked like he was holding someone else’s hand. But holding her felt so natural and comfortable.
Charlie found himself missing Amber very badly. She should be the one in his arms, not the alien. She should be the only woman he was touching or thinking about. He wasn’t ready for anyone else. He wasn’t even sure the world around him was real yet. In fact, it suddenly occurred to him how strange it was that his circumstances felt as normal as they did. Shouldn’t he be screaming and denying everything he saw? What made him just accept that everything was the way they said it was? Surely it was more likely that everything he had experienced over the last few days was just a dream?
Mew Tse ran her hand over his chest in her sleep. He could feel her breath warm on his body. He could feel the freezing air everywhere where she wasn’t touching him. She was real. That room was real.
Some hours later, she woke him when she untangled herself and stood up. At first, Charlie didn’t think anything of it. She began climbing her way towards the ship’s entrance.
“Where are you going?” He asked without opening his eyes.
“Stop me,” she whispered.
Charlie’s eyes opened. He was groggy.
There was no light, but he could hear her moving farther away, moving towards the entrance.
“Mew Tse? Are you okay?” He asked.
“Stop me,” she said again, quieter that time.
Charlie got up. His palm and finger instinctively wrapped around the mace, and he tried to climb through the sideways ruins of the spaceship and follow her.
“Mew, wait,” he called out to her.
The sounds ahead of him suggested that she was climbing through the sand pile by then.
He thought he heard her speak again, but couldn’t make it out.
His hands found the sand and he struggled to climb up to the top in the dark.
As Charlie climbed through the sand, he began to see dim light ahead of him. Then he heard the rain. Just like every night on Primus-3, there was a terrible storm. He pushed the sand away with Avraam’s mace and then slid out of the door. He could see Mew Tse walking ahead of him, just a short distance.
Over the storm he heard her mewling, but couldn’t make out any words. He ran up to her, got in front, and put his arms over hers. “Mew Tse, stop!”
“Charlie, help,” she whispered hoarsely.
The rain was assaulting them. A gust of wind almost knocked Charlie to his knees.
“What’s wrong, Mew?” He asked.
“Parasites. Like Avraam. Like Wu. Leviathan calls.” She was crying. Her face was soaked from the storm, but her cracking voice and her red eyes told Charlie that she was crying.
He pulled her to his chest. “I won’t let you.”
She took another step forward. Charlie tried to stop her, but she shoved her way forward. He was surprised by how strong the alien woman was.
She spoke again, but he couldn’t hear what she said over the storm. And then, she took two more steps forward despite Charlie’s best efforts to stop her.
He turned and looked out towards the beach. A shape seemed to move up in an arc. It was enormous. It was monstrous. Charlie was sure it was the leviathan’s arm.
“Mew, you have to come back with me.”
“Please, Charlie. Stop me,” she whispered. She wasn’t projecting anything on her body then. The rain ran over her breasts and hips, over the contours of her silver-blue stomach.
He shoved her backwards as hard as he could and Mew Tse fell down onto the sand, only to stand again in less time than it took him to grab her.
She was sobbing like a child.
She kept moving forward past Charlie.
The rain soaked them both, their clothes, their bodies, and it ran like a fountain over the metal mace in Charlie’s hand. He had to stop her. He couldn’t let her die.
And then she was on the ground. Charlie hadn’t realized he was doing it when he swung the mace. The thought entered his mind and then, like one of the lightning bolts he struck and it was done. He had cracked it into the side of her elongated futuristic head. She landed in the water with a splash of, not just waves, but also light. For just a second her skin seemed to burst like a super-nova, overwhelming the night and the storm and reality. And then, her brilliance was quickly extinguished.
She was still breathing. Bubbles blew up from beneath the shallow surf. Her light had been so bright, Charlie wondered if they might have seen it from the Shamballa? But the Shamballa was out in space and he had no way to be sure if anyone was even looking.
Crabs began climbing up and moving towards her by the dozen. Charlie kicked and then smashed a few with the heavy mace. Red water splashed up over his mouth and eyes. There seemed to be an impossible amount of it pooling around Mew Tse and his ankles. He understood that a little blood could color a lot of water, but there was just so much of it.
Among the crabs, Charlie saw a strange shambling creature, no larger than a cat or a poodle, walking on four legs and holding two claws up like arms. The long armored segmented body made the captain think of a dragon. The thing’s mouth was open and it was rushing towards Mew Tse.
Lightning flashed and Charlie smashed through the armored carapace exposing green and yellow goo. Half of its back torn open, the monster was still rushing forward. Charlie had to hit it again, and break the skull in half, before it stopped.
And then Charlie saw three more of the nasty little dragons coming at Mew Tse from her far side.
He leapt over her body, thinking that he might have heard her moan as he did so, and set about smashing the others. The heavy weapon pulled at his shoulders as he swung it. He had had far more experience with guns, even knives, but this was how cave-men fought. It was how gorillas and monkeys had done battle for millions of years. And at that moment, that’s what he was.
One of the beasts actually managed to climb on top of Mew Tse’s unconscious and naked form. Charlie had to swing the mace like a golf club twice before it let go and its liquefied remains went sailing out to sea. The next wave brought the broken parts in and they became lodged in one of his footprints on the shore.
There was more lightning. At first Charlie wondered if Mew Tse might have been the cause, but it was just the storm attacking.
And then there was a bellow, a horrible cry like a wounded elk or a hungry bear. And the beast was upon Charlie before he even saw it.
What was chest and what was mouth? Where did the hands end and the claws begin? It took a deep bite into his chest and was preparing to pull back and rip him open before Charlie even fully understood what was happening. He fell backwards into the red foam. His head was under water. But then his training kicked in.
Not even fully conscious of the shape or size of what he was fighting, he used its weight against it and flipped the creature over. He stuck his weapon into the alien’s mouth and began pounding on the back of its throat.
It let go.
Charlie stood up and saw the monster. It was big like a crocodile, and it had muscles like a wrestler. Horns and tusks and spikes covered it with an insane variety of shapes and sizes. It had two large wet rolly-eyes which appeared to be crossed. One of them had a burst blood vessel, which Charlie had certainly caused.
There were no fingers, just a series
of six pincers at the end of each arm, which came together like a blender.
The captain roared at the alien like an animal. He bore his teeth, turned sideways, and prepared for it to rush at him again. He understood that it would gut him if those “hands” got anywhere near his belly. He also understood that it was far far stronger than he was.
And he had no idea where its pressure points might be.
Mew Tse rolled in the surf, threatening to be pulled out with each recession. If the water grabbed her, Charlie knew that he would not find her body. There would be a new version of Mew Tse who didn’t know him.
The thing leaped and it almost tore his head off with those razor-sharp pincers, but Charlie swung at its hand with all of his power and actually managed to break two of the pincers and shatter the bones beneath.
The creature’s bulk still careened into him, and knocked Charlie beneath the water. Had the monster not been in such pain, it would have surely finished him. He would have been powerless, but it howled and whined like a kicked dog. It jumped and ran across the beach, maybe twenty feet or more away.
It stood hunched, licking the wreckage of its hand. It stood between Charlie and their shelter. He stepped forward, out of the drink and onto the sand. It moved backwards and Charlie saw fear in the creature’s crossed googly eyes.
He understood that it was now at its most dangerous.
He walked forward. He shook the salt water and blood from his hair and wiped it from his face, all the while glowering at his opponent.
He started singing a lyric from one of his songs over and over again, “Start a fire inside and burn the room,” inching closer and closer.
It didn’t run away. It moved its head around, as if telegraphing that it was looking for an opening, a weakness in him to pounce on. Charlie kept singing through clenched teeth as he walked forward. Then he lifted the mace above his head and leapt forward like a howling barbarian.
“Start a fire inside and burn the room.”
Horns dug into his legs and his shoulders as he pounded the hunk of metal into the monsters’s face. Once, twice, twenty-two, twenty three, he swung the mace until there was nothing left of the alien but pus and bone. The metal slid from his lubricated hands and he stood in the rain panting and grunting and staring at the body, for fear that it would get up again.
He returned to the woman. She had moved farther from the sand, but was still floating just a few body lengths from shore. Charlie bent down to her, his eyes blurring. Her face was covered in blood and alien ichor. He bent down and picked her up, leaving the mace behind on the beach where he had dropped it, and carried her back into the wrecked spaceship. He took her to safety.
He ran his fingers over her face. The cheek-bone seemed to be broken. When he felt it, it was sharp against his hand. Mew Tse was unconscious, but still alive. She had grown noticeably hotter to the touch and he was sure that that meant she had a fever. He opened the two new survival kits and found the tube which he had seen Sally using on Avraam. He lathered it into the side of her face and it did stop the bleeding. He used a little on his own wounds. As the adrenalin subsided, his many cuts began to sing with pain. The medicine helped, but that didn’t matter to him.
He felt something desperate in his chest. He didn’t want her to forget their time together, to forget him. He didn’t want to be a stranger to her after what they had been through. He held onto her all through the night.
11
In the morning, they were rescued. Charlie was woken up by red lights inside of their shelter and he saw the sand pile rapidly being vacuumed out of the way. Wu Gwei came and carried Mew Tse onto the rescue shuttle. Charlie was astounded to see Wu Gwei without any visible cybernetic implants at all, but he recognized him.
Queen Gloryannana brought a drink over to Charlie and insisted that he drink it right away. “It has special vitamoids and protolytes. Your body needs them,” she explained. “Are there any other survivors?”
“No. There was a worm – a parasite. It infected Avraam and Mew. It came from a giant monster. The worm makes you walk into the ocean and right into the monsters mouth. I had to hurt Mew to stop her,” Charlie explained.
“Mew, huh?” Gloryannana teased. “It sounds like you two have had a chance to get know each other. She’ll be alright,” Gloryannana promised as she walked Charlie back to the ship. On the way, he saw Avraam’s mace and stopped to pick it up. The rain had cleaned the weapon, but hadn’t washed it away.
Gloryannana’s eyes opened wide. “Mr. Fock’s hammer? He loved this old thing. He’ll be really happy to have it again.”
“How did you find us? And what the hell took so long?” Charlie asked.
“First I saw Wu. Then I saw Avraam and Sally sitting in the garden together. We looked everywhere, but couldn’t find you or Mew Tse. I was really worried, Captain. Your last birthday was so dramatic and I didn’t want you to forget everything again so quickly.”
“Who was monitoring our mission?” he asked, but no one answered. In exhaustion he understood that there was no protocol. There was no one watching to make sure the shuttle returned safely. Things would have to change.
As they walked onto the shuttle, Charlie saw Sally Brightly was preparing the ship for takeoff. He noticed Mew Tse on a special hospital bed. Doctor Aelfwyrd was taking care of her.
“What the he-” Charlie started to yell, but Gloryannana grabbed him.
“Charlie, he’s the doctor. I can’t treat her and you don’t know anything about even 21st century medicine. Let him do his job.”
Charlie quietly sat down. His first mate strapped herself in next to him. Wu Gwei was the last one to walk in. He was carrying a black box with a metal handle.
“Is that the flight recorder?” Charlie asked the Queen.
She giggled. “Oh, Charlie, dear, my dear sweet Captain. The crew died. Any flight recorder would be blank. That’s the power source. They last for thousands of years and nothing good could come of leaving it on that beach.”
“Is it radioactive?” he asked.
“Radio? Radio?” She laughed. “The danger is that if it ruptured it could bend space and create any number of singularities and trialities in the area. And beyond that, it’s valuable. You don’t throw something like that away.”
“What’s a triality?”
She smiled. “It’s a point of rupture in space which takes zero and one dimensional objects and fills them. It confers width, height, and length.”
“What’s a zero-dimensional object?” he asked.
“It’s an idea, Charlie, without any substance in the world, just an airless balloon in your head waiting for air.”
“Just being near that thing can make ideas real?” he asked incredulously.
“I’m told it’s the basis of Geft technology. Not that you would want it to happen that way. Not with a rupture and watching them all bleed into existence. There would be no quality control. No checks. They wouldn’t come out the way you want them.”
“The Geft machine… Umbra Farah was telling me about that. It sounds ridiculous.”
“Doesn’t it though? I spend a lot of time imagining what I could have done with that. I almost bankrupted the British Corporation setting us up on Mars. If I could have just printed out the ships and cities, my life would have been a lark!”
“Do we have one?” Charlie asked.
She shook her head. “No, we have a lot on The Shamballa. But they didn’t give us one of those.”
“Did we ever try and build one?”
“Not that I know of. Some of the crew were born centuries after the Geft was constructed, but it’s not simple. I don’t really understand the process, but my understanding is that we lack the resources to build one.”
“Could a Geft machine send us home?”
No one answered.
Charlie glared at Aelfwyrd across the ship. He was standing next to and tending to Mew Tse, even as the ship lifted up off of the planet. He rubbed a red lotion against
her skin, and then injected her with a blue syringe.
“That bastard,” Charlie snarled. “I don’t trust him. I don’t want him on my ship.”
Queen Gloryannana laughed out loud. “Oh, Charlie-barley. What do you want to do? You can kill him, of course. Kill him twenty-five times so you can feel like you’re one up on him? But every time you kill him he’ll come back. And every time he comes back he’ll be pure and innocent and not responsible for what the last Aelfwyrd did. He’s useful. He’s brilliant. He’s one of the most important minds of the last five hundred years.”
“He belongs in a cage.”
Gloryannana didn’t answer for a while. She gave Charlie a moment to calm down. Then she began, “When I first met David we were back on Earth. Oh yes, did you know? We knew each other before the mission. He had a dream. He wanted humanity to live on every planet in the universe. He imagined people walking through the liquid metals of Venus, the deep-space-ice of Pluto. He had a picture he had drawn of a woman designed to live in the endless skies of Jupiter.”
“How idealistic,” Charlie said sarcastically.
“He was. I asked him why. I asked him why he wanted people to live in all of those places. Do you know what he said? Because they would be wonderful. I’ve known a lot of men who wanted to be rich, or famous. I’ve known men who wanted women and men who wanted men, but I’ve known very very few who would spare even a moment’s thought to creating wonder.”
“Mmm. And what would he be willing to sacrifice for that wonder? Did you ask him that?”
“I didn’t have to. I knew the answer. Doctor David Aelfwyrd was willing to risk going down in history as a monster for a chance to give the people of the future the universe. That’s why he belongs on this crew.”
It was a short trip back up to the Shamballa. Mew Tse was wheeled away on a hospital bed. Sally pushed her. Aelfwyrd buzzed around, apparently concerned about her condition. Charlie didn’t trust him. It seemed like overkill for him to need to continue examining her as Brightly wheeled her away.
The Secrets of the Universe (Farther Than We Dreamed Book 1) Page 18