Furnace

by Joseph Williams

  “Steadily gaining altitude,” Teems announced. His voice rose in pitch the longer we stayed in the air. He couldn’t mask his excitement. I don’t think anyone really wanted him to.

  “Switch to main screen,” Gallagher commanded, seating herself in the captain’s chair. I don’t think it was a calculated move so much as one of convenience (it was the only empty seat remaining on the main bridge area) but I imagine it wouldn’t have sat well with most of the crew if they’d seen it. However, most of the crew was dead by then, anyway, so I guess it didn’t matter.

  “Yes, sir,” Rosie answered.

  The display screen switched from a direct view of the crater to a live feed from the aft bow. A perfect view of the city of Tscharia, in other words. Even seeing it through the screen made me shudder.

  “Master Gunner, are you ready?”

  “Yes, sir,” Lao confirmed over the crackling comm line. Evidently, it wasn’t completely fixed yet.

  “Fire when ready,” Gallagher told him.

  “Yes, sir.”

  I didn’t see the point in leveling the city for any reason but spite, which I guess is understandable enough except that you never want to waste your ship’s heavy explosives when you don’t absolutely need to. Unlike small arms, med supplies, and foodstuffs, charges for pulse blasts that meet fleet specifications are extremely hard to come by outside Earth’s solar system. I kept my mouth shut, though, because I wanted to see the city blown to dust just like the rest of them. Probably even more so. I was the one who’d been down there, after all. The one who’d witnessed the atrocities perpetrated in the ancient city. I was sure they’d seen their fair share of fucked-up shit onboard the Rockne Hummel (I wouldn’t realize just how fucked up until I met with Gallagher, Rosie, Teemo, and Lao on the way back) but it still pales in comparison to what I experienced on the surface.

  “Jesus Christ,” Teemo gasped. “Look at that.”

  He pointed toward the view screen as if the rest of us weren’t already looking.

  I heard Gallagher swallow hard behind me. “Any time now, Master Gunner.”

  The view was spectacular, in a disturbing way. Beyond the crater on the side opposite the city of Tscharia, there was a graveyard of ships that stretched for miles. Skeletons, most of them. Ravaged by the harsh surface winds. Some had retained their general shape despite centuries spent in the elements. None of them looked functional.

  “How many do you think they’ve trapped here?” Rosie whispered.

  No one answered. No one needed to. The answer was right in front of us in the endless graveyard. I still didn’t think the view was an accurate representation of Furnace’s victims, though. I knew there were a lot more somewhere, perhaps buried beneath the capital city like the clown king’s vessel.

  That could have been us, I thought. We were next in line.

  I chewed my lower lip thoughtfully, watching the landscape fill the view screen.

  So why is he letting us go when none of the others escaped?

  I didn’t know for certain that no other ship had gotten away, though, so I saw no point in worrying about it.

  Even more disturbing than the graveyards was the sight of the lands beyond Tscharia. The corpse fields. The lava lakes. The wastelands, and then the nightmares beyond it. Empty castles with scores of bodies on slow-roasting pits that unraveled each victim’s intestines as they spun. A writhing mob of the damned slogging their way along a valley of snakes. Innumerable aliens stoking massive, industrial fires far in the distance.

  I shuddered.

  “My God,” Rosie whispered.

  Somehow, it was worse seeing it all from above. More imposing. In fact, looking down on all the carnage in a miniature scale which was still too big to ignore, I couldn’t believe I’d made it through everything and lived to tell about it. There were many who hadn’t. Millions. Billions. Gallagher put her hand on my shoulder again, as if to apologize for all that I’d been through even though I hadn’t elaborated on my experiences yet.

  I tore my eyes away from the view screen and focused on the navigation controls. I didn’t need to watch any more. I’d lived it. And who knew what other senseless horrors occurred elsewhere on the planet? Maybe Tscharia wasn’t even the only city on Furnace with a clown king and an army of exiled nightmares. Maybe Tscharia was the smallest city on Furnace with the most lenient, civilized demons. There was no way to tell with our sensors just coming back online. It wasn’t important, and we weren’t about to stretch the systems for a planet-wide scan when it risked frying them all over again. That may have grounded us if we weren’t careful, and certainly would make breaking orbit and getting home a hell of a lot more difficult than it already was.

  “Lao, what’s the hold up?” Gallagher asked over the comm line. She walked up to the view screen as though she’d somehow gain insight just by examining the landscape.

  “Locking on target now, Representative. I want to make sure we hit the heart of the city. I don’t want anything left, and I don’t want to shoot twice.”

  Folding her arms across her chest, Gallagher turned and walked back to the captain’s chair. “Fair enough,” she said. “But hurry up.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “For fuck’s sake,” Teemo said softly. “He’s looking at us.”

  My eyes leapt back to the view screen. I couldn’t help myself. I knew deep down who he was talking about and what I would see, but I still couldn’t prevent it.

  It was the clown king, staring straight through the monitor like he knew exactly where the camera was. He probably did.

  “Zoom in,” Gallagher said, walking directly back to the view screen. “It’s saying something.”

  Rosie isolated the horned demon and focused in on his position. Seeing him up close again drained the color from my face. I knew he was speaking directly to me.

  Wherever you go, he mouthed. I will find you.

  In my head, I heard the voices chanting, “Here…here…here…”

  Tscharia.

  I blinked and he was gone.

  “We’ll break through the stratosphere in just a few moments, sir,” Teemo reported.

  “Lao?”

  “Firing in five, four, three, two, one.”

  We watched silently as the pulse beam sprang out from the ship, disappeared in the heart of the city momentarily, and then was replaced by a rapidly-expanding wreath of fire and debris.

  Teemo whistled. “So long, assholes.”

  I’d never seen such a huge pulse blast before from such close range. No wonder Lao Gang had taken so long arming the blast and picking his target. I think he probably had a better idea than the rest of us how big the explosion would be and wanted to make sure we were at a safe distance before detonation.

  “We’re gaining altitude. Should be out in open space within two minutes,” Teemo said.

  I checked the readings again even though I knew he was right. It gave me something to do other than stare at the explosion and think of all the fallen soldiers we’d left behind. Not just dead, but sentenced to a hundred thousand years of torture. If I’d realized that was the reality back when they’d died, I never would have left their bodies. Not that I could have done much, of course. I was in bad shape. I’d barely made it back to the ship, and it had taken more than a miracle to get there. Worst of all, I’d indebted myself to the clown king in the process.

  Sold my soul to the Devil, I thought sourly.

  I’d never thought I’d use the phrase literally.

  Wherever you go, I will find you.

  His face kept appearing in my head, even as the pulse blast swept out from Tscharia and blanketed the surface in dust and fire as far as the eye could see.

  He’s gone, I told myself.

  I wasn’t so sure, though. How can you kill the Devil? How can you kill evil itself?

  “Brace yourselves,” Teemo said. “This is going to be a rough one.”

  I strapped into my seat and closed my eyes.

  Please
, God, get us home, I prayed as the ship rattled around me. The shields hadn’t been fully repaired after we crashed. There simply hadn’t been enough time or resources to finish everything that needed work, so Rosie’s team had focused on getting them strong enough to withstand space and a turbulent departure, but we wouldn’t be able to land anywhere until we patched the rest of it. Apparently, all but two of her team members had been killed as the first wave of demons swept through the ship.

  “Hang on,” Teemo shouted over the howling atmosphere. “Almost through.”

  “Break orbit and cloak immediately!” Gallagher yelled.

  I understood the sentiment, but she hadn’t met the clown king. Cloaking the ship would mean jack-shit with him. He didn’t use sensors to locate his prey. At least, not the kind that could be tricked by a rudimentary cloaking device designed specifically to pass beneath the scans of Kalak warships.

  As we broke orbit and shot into space, I opened my eyes and stared with wild relief at the black expanse.

  Please, God, I prayed again. Please, get me home.

  “We’re clear,” Teemo announced with a heavy sigh. He slunk back into his chair and wiped sweat from his brow.

  Tears formed in my eyes and I fought them back, embarrassed. I didn’t know if it would last long, but for that moment, I was free.

  Free, I thought, unstrapping my safety harness and stumbling toward the elevator, not paying any attention to Rosie or Gallagher as they held out their arms with concern.

  “Let us help you,” Rosie said.

  I shooed her away. “I’m fine.” I’ve never lied so deeply in my life.

  “Where to?” Teemo asked.

  Gallagher helped me into the elevator despite my protests. “We wait a while,” she said. “Lieutenant Chalmers needs medical attention.”

  I limped into the elevator and pressed the button for Deck Three and my personal quarters. Gallagher watched me carefully, likely debating whether or not she should accompany me. “I’m going to go sleep for a couple weeks,” I told her.

  She grinned weakly. “Good. I’ll send a doctor if any of them are still alive.”

  I didn’t think they were, and at least two of the three didn’t have medical expertise any greater than the field training the rest of us had in Basic, but I didn’t feel like explaining that to her. “Yes, sir,” I said instead.

  The elevator door closed and I collapsed against the far wall as the decks dinged by.

  Free, I thought.

  Wherever you go, I will find you.

  I didn’t make it to my room. When the doors opened on Deck Three, I simply crawled out to the common area and slept on the warm steel for a long, long time.

  While I slept, the Devil worked his dark magic again. He wasn’t done with us yet.

  RETURN

  I wasn’t awake when it happened so I can’t necessarily confirm that the clown king of Tscharia was the one who transported the Rockne Hummel back to the point in the Milky Way from which he’d extracted us. But as a navigator and someone who’s had firsthand experience with his transportation magic on two separate occasions (entering the wastelands and arriving in the bowels of the Hummel just in time for takeoff), I can tell you it is the only reasonable (ha!) explanation. Either way, we suddenly appeared right where we’d initially lost contact with fleet command like nothing had happened. The only difference was that our ship was pointed in the opposite direction.

  Back towards home.

  Once I realized we were back where we’d started, I wondered fleetingly if it had all been a dream. A grotesque nightmare birthed by the combined evils of the so-called ‘Visions of Parin’ (space madness) and the chemicals involved in the hyper-sleep stasis pods. That would have been a convenient explanation both for us and the fleet, but physical evidence of our time on Furnace is everywhere. The most glaring corroboratory items are corpses of alien species that don’t exist in the fleet database, of course, but our ship’s log shows that we traveled an impossible number of light years. Utterly impossible. Something in the duocentillions. Perhaps into another universe altogether. All we can do is shake our heads and accept it.

  In all, twenty of us survived. Myself, Teemo, Gallagher, Rosie, Captain Gibbons, Martavius the Cook, Lao Gang, two of the doctors, and eleven other personnel members I’d never had contact with prior to the voyage home. Nearly all the officers made it. All except Salib. That’s the shit of it, I guess. There’s no reason why the higher-ranking officers should have made it instead of the grunt workers. No rational explanation, anyway. Especially for Teemo and me, who were both on the surface for hours.

  I do have a theory, though. I think there’s a reason the pilot, navigator, master gunner, Crown Representative, chief engineer, and doctors survived. I think the clown king wanted us to. I think he picked us specifically because he knew we were the ones who could get the ship back home. Back to Earth.

  I think he had a plan.

  The question was raised whether or not we should attempt to complete our diplomatic mission, but there was no real debate. Even Representative Gallagher had to admit that it was foolish to even consider such a thing given the heavy losses we’d sustained. Besides, we needed extensive repairs on the ship before we could land and we were already way behind schedule for pickup. That’s to say nothing of the message we’d be sending disparaged colonists by extracting a high-ranking Crown politician in our beat-up vessel.

  Instead, I plotted a course for Pluto Station and we roamed the ship restlessly for days, trying not to think too much about what had happened or the soldiers we’d left behind. Teemo and I cleaned up the bodies the best we could, just so we wouldn’t have to pass them every time we performed systems checks in the lower decks or got up in the middle of the night for a snack from the mess hall. It didn’t erase the bad memories—far from it—but it spaced them out so we could at least breathe a little without remembering.

  Despite my reservations, one of the doctors patched me up pretty well. My wounds were mostly superficial, after all, and were cured with ointment, dermal regeneration, and a whole lot of rest. By the time we reached the research labs on Pluto, I was almost good as new.

  Captain Gibbons, however, is another story. I didn’t catch all the details because the crew is still being questioned about the events that transpired on the Rockne Hummel while I was on the surface, but the gist of it is that things were a lot tenser between Gibbons and Gallagher than I’d realized. More to the point, Gibbons was a lot closer to the edge than I’d suspected. They say that career astronauts often snap when they’ve spent too much time in the void, but I guess I hadn’t known the captain was capable of falling into the deep end until just before he sent me out on the ground mission. Even then, I’d thought he was just a little (understandably) tense given the nature of the situation.

  Gibbons hadn’t just snapped, though. He’d gone bat-shit crazy.

  He started the massacre aboard the Hummel by turning a pulse rifle on his own soldiers, and finished by using a fire ax and his bare hands. In all, he was responsible for the deaths of twenty-four crewmembers aboard the ship, and if you add the ones from Salib’s squad who he sent to their deaths on a fool’s errand, that number just about doubles. There are also reports that he purposely damaged a significant number of key systems upon our arrival on Furnace, making Rosie’s job much more difficult than it had to be. Which, I guess, is fortunate for me. If Rosie had gotten the systems up and running even ten minutes sooner, I would have been stranded on the planet.

  I shudder to think what it would have been like to be stuck there forever. I dream about it almost every night. Whenever I’m able to fall asleep.

  Eventually, Gallagher had enlisted the help of Rosie, Lao Gang, and several other soldiers to sedate Captain Gibbons, at which point he was locked in the brig and wasn’t released until the Patrol ship Pluto Station sent to intercept us docked and escorted him to another cell. I’m sure there’s one hell of a dark and harrowing story there, but like I sa
id, the members of the crew with information pertaining to Captain Gibbons’ mental collapse and subsequent killing spree haven’t been released from fleet headquarters. Maybe Gallagher will tell me about it sometime. Maybe it will help ease her guilt, if she carries any. She doesn’t exactly strike me as the guilt-bearing type, but people surprise you sometimes.

  I guess it’s really her story to tell, anyway. Or his. Maybe one of them will share the details with the committee the same way I have. A detailed written account. It should save me from repetitive questions going forward (I hope), and it’s certainly helped to get the ordeal off my chest. I guess we’ll find out eventually if one of them chooses to do the same, although I don’t know that it’s in the best interest of the public to leak details about Furnace.

  By the way, Gallagher’s the one who started calling it ‘Furnace’ after I explained the history of the planet and its inhabitants. The name seems to fit well enough. Not Hell, exactly, because it has a unique place separate from the religious mythology on our home planet. Furnace, where everything burns.

  I’ve kept my mouth shut for the most part, even when my mother asks why I’ve suddenly been granted six months of paid leave. It’s important to keep it secret, at least for a while. We might never get another colony established if people feel they need to worry about getting sucked into Hell itself on top of all the other dangers involved with a deep space mission and settling a terra-formed planet. Besides, if I breathed a word about any of this, I’m sure the Crown would have soldiers dragging me to a Psychiatric Convalescence center within hours, or a penal colony on another godforsaken rock. Probably on the moons of Jupiter. Maybe Haley Penn, otherwise known as the Pit.

  I still can’t sleep at night, and it’s not just the nightmares of what I’ve seen that haunts me. Since passing out during our escape from Furnace—a rest better described as an exhaustion-induced coma than a normal sleep cycle—I lie awake every night, staring at the ceiling and reflecting on how I screwed up the whole mission. How I’m responsible for the loss of so many lives. Good people, all of them. In their own ways.