by Stuart Clark
“Oh, shit!” Par looked horrified. Chris froze. Furball jumped from one chair headrest to another, chittering and screeching.
A nose came down level with the shuttle roof. A nostril bigger than Chris’s fist came into their view. They could hear it breathing. Could it smell them? The head came down lower still and a single milky eyeball the size of a human head regarded them with indifference.
“Shut the door!” Par yelled and with that the massive head rammed into the side of the shuttle and sent Chris sprawling towards the open entrance, dangerously close to a mouth that could have swallowed him whole. The head pulled away again.
“Quiet!” Bobby demanded.
“What?” Par couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He had already picked up his gun and was frantically checking the clip for bullets.
“Shhhh!” Bobby instructed. She turned to Par. “If you use that thing on it, all you’ll do is aggravate it. You won’t kill it, you’ll just injure it.”
“And what would you have us do, just sit here?”
She motioned Chris to join them. She seemed incredibly calm. “What do you see?” she asked him quietly.
“Huh?”
“Look at it. What do you see?”
“What do you mean?”
“You have to know what you are dealing with,” she whispered. “If we’re going to live, we have to understand how it lives. What it senses. Look at its eyes. What do you see?”
“Well…they’re milky white.”
“It’s blind,” Par said behind them.
“It hunts by sound,” Bobby confirmed.
Furball continued to jabber and squeal behind them all. Par looked at it with distaste. “Well in that case will somebody shut that thing up before it gets us all killed!”
The ship got rammed again.
“Why don’t you shut the hell up!” Chris hissed through gritted teeth. “Every time you open that big mouth of yours that bloody thing attacks us!”
“Don’t blame me, kid, it was probably your incessant banging that attracted it in the first place.”
“Oh, so it’s my fault, is it?”
“Well, it’s your fault that I have to play friggin’ hopscotch to get around this shuttle. Some kind of sick joke of yours, is it, knowing that I’ve only got one good leg?”
“Now hang on! I’m trying to save your life! All of this will be for nothing if this ship folds as thin as a piece of tin foil as soon as we enter space.”
The creature outside rammed the side of the ship again, bringing them both to their senses.
“Jesus!”
“Shut up, the pair of you!” Bobby flapped her hands at both of them. Quietly they both crawled to where she lay.
“What do we do now?” Chris whispered.
“We wait for it to leave.”
“It must have been what attacked the shuttle the first time. They must have tried to get away.”
“Swatted it straight out of the sky,” Par whispered beside him. “Just like I said.”
* * * * *
Wyatt’s creature came for him. A creature of tooth and claw bursting through the undergrowth.
He sat up. It was dark. The MedLab’s reserve lighting was on. Strips of neon blue punctuated the black. He looked down and could see beads of sweat caught and hanging in his chest hair. He rubbed his face with his hand.
Kit was slumped in his chair, the ropes keeping him upright. He didn’t look comfortable but then Wyatt really didn’t give a shit. Gon-Thok had been convinced to spend the night in a hydration tank, used normally for treating the effects of hypothermia or extreme cold. Wyatt could see it through the glass, suspended in the water, the gills on its neck rising and falling occasionally. Kate was nowhere to be seen. She’d been on the examination table next to him, but now there was just an untidy pile of sheets. Where could she have gone? She didn’t know her way around this ship.
He swung his legs off the table and picked up the flashlight he’d found in one of the cabinets. He pulled his pants on as he walked, made a last check on Kit, and walked out of the MedLab. The walk would do him good, give him time to exorcise the nightmare. He could never go straight back to sleep. Not after that. Besides, he doubted she’d gone far.
He found her a short walk away. She’d gone up the nearest stairwell and found what looked to be a large common room or bar. Tables and chairs were scattered everywhere. The place was a mess.
She stood with her back to him, looking out at a semi-circle of what were once windows. There was nothing to see through them but the white rock. Some of the windows had smashed completely and small stones and rocks had spilled into the ship to collect in scattered piles on the floor. The rest were shattered, some missing large triangular shards which had been punched out by the pressure and which had no doubt shattered again on hitting the floor, the reinforced glass exploding across the deck. The fragments were as thick as ice cubes, just like the ones they had slipped in the drinks in here only hours before the impact. In places, water seeped in, collecting in little puddles, irregular black voids on the floor. Once in a while, a drop would disturb their perfect surfaces of liquid night and send silver ripples scurrying away to their edges.
This place wasn’t dark like the rest of the ship. The color of the rock seemed to give it a faint light, or maybe his eyes were just adjusted to the gloom now. He turned off his flashlight. “What’s up? Couldn’t sleep?”
She jumped, then turned to face him. “No. I just…I thought I was alone.”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. I just noticed you were gone, so I uh…well,” he finished with a smile.
“And you?”
“Huh?”
“Couldn’t sleep?”
“Oh! No. I mean yes. I mean…I had things on my mind.”
“Me too,” she said quietly and turned to look blankly at the shattered windows.
He came up behind her. “Did you find your answers?”
She turned to look over her shoulder at him. “I don’t know.”
“What’s troubling you?”
She turned to look him squarely in the face. “Are we going to make it, Wyatt? Are we really going to make it home?”
“Why, sure.”
The hope drained from her face. She looked disgusted with him.
“What? What did I say?”
“You just told me what you thought I wanted to hear, what everyone wants to hear. ‘Oh, it’ll be all right.’ I was hoping for more from you. I thought we knew each other well enough that you could be honest with me.”
“What do you want me to say? Do you want me to lie?”
“I don’t want you to say anything,” she snapped, her eyes filling with tears. “I want the truth. Are we going to get away from this place, because I really need to know?”
He hung his head. “I don’t know,” he said quietly. He looked up at her again. “But I wouldn’t be here right now if I didn’t think we had a chance.”
“I’m scared, Wyatt.”
“Hey, it’s okay to be scared. We’re all scared.”
She looked at him suspiciously, a tear running down her face. “That’s bullshit. You’re not scared of anything. Nothing bothers you. Nothing even fazes you.”
“What? You think because I don’t show fear, I’m not scared inside? Every time I go out I’m scared. Scared of where I’m going. Scared of what I’ll meet. Scared I’ll lose one of my crew. But I can’t let them see that. What good would I be to them? None of us would come back alive. “Not scared? Pah! W-w-what do you think I am? Some kind of machine?”
“I wonder sometimes.”
He looked at her, brows knitted together, clearly offended.
She shook her head. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.” She took a step towards him. “Hold me?” she asked and before he could protest she already had her arms around him.
Wyatt had never felt more awkward before in his life. His arms splayed out in front of him and he held his head high so a
s not to touch the top of hers with his chin. He struggled to look down at her and got a faint smell of her hair. There was a faint scent that marked her as female. He closed his eyes and breathed it in. She smelt so good.
He relaxed a little and brought his arms down around her, stroking her hair with a hand. He knew that she was crying silently into his chest.
He smelt her hair again, the femininity of it, and caught his breath as images of Tanya flooded his mind. It felt like he were betraying her memory. He’d never got over losing her. Kate felt him tense. “Is there…Is there someone?” she asked between sniffs.
“Huh?”
“Is there someone else? Someone who waits for you?”
“Yes. No! I mean…I mean there was once.”
“What happened?”
He fought the lump rising in his throat. His voice shaking with emotion. “Uh, she uh, she couldn’t wait any more.” He smiled sadly.
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. Me too. I’m sorry too.”
They stood there for a long time after that. Neither of them saying a word, just holding each other in the darkness and listening to the occasional drop of water. Then Kate spoke again. “Why do you trap?” she asked into his chest.
He frowned above her, not really understanding the question. “Well, it’s my job. That’s what I do.”
“But you. I’d have thought you wouldn’t have done it.”
“Why?”
“Well, because you know…” she stopped, not knowing whether it was a good idea to continue, whether she might again cause offense with her insinuation. “Well, because you, of all people, know how precious freedom is.” There was a long period of silence before Wyatt answered.
“It’s a good point,” he mused. “To be honest with you, I’d never really thought about it. I know that when we cage some of these animals we strip them of their dignity. Sometimes you can just see it in their eyes, see the light dim, especially the intelligent ones.”
He laughed to himself. “You know, we humans think we’re great. Think that we’ve got this whole universe figured out nicely. That we’re top of the pecking order. But every now and then you look into a creature’s eyes and know that it despises you. You know that given a half-chance it could snuff you out without even thinking about it.
“It’s funny, y’know. We measure intellect on a scale that we devised but alien intelligence doesn’t even conform to it. It’s an altogether different intellect. You can’t name it or categorize it or put it in a box. It’s immeasurable. There are things locked up in the IZP back on Earth that in a different life, on a different world, would rule us. You can’t tell people that, it’s just something you learn from experience. The people back home…they just want something different to look at.” He sighed. “To begin with it was just a job. Now it’s my life. I don’t know any different. I can’t do anything else. Not now.”
“But you can!” Kate protested. “You can do so much more. Look, promise me if we make it back, you’ll give up all this.”
It was the same request that Tanya had made of him and it hit him like a bucket of cold water. He stood there, stunned for a while, and the silence filled the air while his mind reeled.
“What was it you did?” Kate asked.
“Huh? What?” He was still thinking of Tanya.
“What did they lock you up for?”
He grabbed her by the sleeves painfully and pushed her away from him. His eyes burnt in the darkness. “Of all the things you could ask me you want to know that? Why?” He stepped away from her. She didn’t even get the chance to reply. “You know, that’s the trouble with us, everybody focuses on the bad, nobody wants to see the good in anything any more!”
“But I know you’re a good person.”
“So what does the rest matter?” he snapped. He started to walk away from her towards the door.
“Because if I never know, I’ll only know half the person. I can’t know only half of you.”
“You don’t want to know me. Whatever would possess you to want to do that?” and with that he was gone.
Kate’s eyes filled with tears. “Because I think I love you.”
CHAPTER
17
“Remove hyperdrive housing locking bolt.” Kate flicked the flashlight beam off Chris’ crumpled instructions and back to the hole in the floor in which Wyatt worked and fumbled for a new tool.
It had taken them nearly two hours to locate the engine room this morning. Half an hour to find the bridge and then, when they discovered the bridge had no power and they couldn’t call up the ship’s blueprints on computer, another fifteen minutes to find the hardcopies Wyatt knew were stashed somewhere in case of just such circumstances. They had spent over an hour winding their way down through the ship, through its darkness, like specks of food passing through a great beast’s gullet. Forced on by pressure. An unseen force.
To where? The stomach, the place where energy was converted to power. Power. The engine room.
Numerous times they had stopped while Wyatt shuffled through the sheaves of oversized maps, cursing their impracticality before folding them to focus on a smaller area, like a crossword enthusiast scrutinizing the clues. Bringing the flashlight to shine on the thin paper, the faint blue lines, then shining its light on the ceiling, the walls, searching for something, looking for clues.
The darkness was oppressive, haunting them like a presence. Only the blade of light kept it at bay, fending it off like a sword.
Pressure.
Until now. A wave of relief washing over them like cool water. The discovery of the engine room easing the burden they both felt, slightly but tangibly. Even the darkness seemed to have lifted a little, backed off as if wary. Maybe their eyes had just grown accustomed to it.
“Can you shine that over here a bit?”
She did as she was asked, seeing what Wyatt indicated, a bolt sat atop a large drum, like a crown on an obese monarch; saw him apply a large wrench to it, hands, pale in the bright light, heard him grunt with effort in the darkness.
There was a bang and she heard him cry out. The wrench had gone from the small lit stage. Slipped.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” he managed, she guessed, through gritted teeth.
She found his hand with the flashlight and saw the rubies of blood already forming on three of his knuckles. Then his hand was gone too, whisked away as he attempted to shake off the pain as easily as the drops of blood.
He applied the wrench again, gingerly this time, before clamping it on and locating a hammer with which to bang it around, rather than risk his knuckles again. Two firm hits and it spun easily so that he could remove it with his fingers.
He cast the nut away, not caring for it, hearing it clatter to rest in the darkness. Lost. Where it could do him no more harm. Another hurdle removed and to be forgotten. Press on.
He lifted the hatch on the drum slowly, cautiously, as if afraid of what he might find inside. Something else to hurt him. Make him bleed.
He was plunged into darkness. “Lift out hyperdrive housing,” Kate read above him before his light returned. He reached inside, bent over so his body blocked the light, hands fumbling blindly for a hold, found one, then pulled. The housing barely moved. It was heavy and he was not expecting its weight. It was going to be an effort.
“Stand back, will you? I’m going to have to lift this thing out and drop it quickly.”
“Sure.”
He heard the metal flooring clank as she retreated a few steps, then returned his attention to the hyperdrive. He took a deep breath, then heaved, holding the second breath as he struggled with the housing. Slowly, too slowly it seemed, it came. His face reddened with the exertion, his arms trembled as if afraid they might fail, but then it was out, clear of the drum and he half-threw, half dumped it onto the deck that Kate stood on next to him.
For a second the noise was deafening, a loud metallic clang which reverberated around the room like the
peal of a gigantic bell, but then it was gone, escaping the confines of the chamber to scream down nearby tunnels where it was engulfed by their black maws. The silence returned. His pulse beat its loud rhythm in his temples, the muscles in his arms burned with oxygen deficit, shaking. “What now?” he squinted into the blinding light of the flashlight.
The interrogating beam left him to question the paper held in her hand. “Unscrew housing cylinder,” she dictated from above him.
“And where’s that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well doesn’t he say?”
“No.” She played the light over the black cylinder on the floor next to her. Featureless except for the handle Wyatt had used to lift it out by. “The handle,” she hinted. Wyatt looked at her speculatively, “What about it?”
“Turn it.”
Wyatt sighed and climbed out of the well he’d been working in to stand next to her, over their prize. He took the handle in one hand, tried it, nothing. Gripped it in both hands. Again, nothing. “That’s not it,” he scratched the back of his head. Kate was not so sure.
“Here,” she offered, kneeling down to grip the sides of the hyperdrive housing, “Try again. I’ll provide you with some resistance, could just be a build-up of pressure.” He shrugged, not convinced, but conceded to apply himself to the handle once more. For a second, as they both strained and groaned with the effort, Kate thought that she may have indeed been wrong, but then something gave and there was the hiss of escaping gas.
They both stopped and looked at the housing. Even in the dark they could see a ring of white around the handle, glinting, crystalline. Kate picked up the flashlight again and shone it on the housing. The white ring shrank under the beam’s stare. Tiny wisps of vapor fled away from it. She dabbed at it experimentally with a finger, leaving imprints on the black of the housing underneath. Ice. A cooling gas, liquefied under intense pressure, vaporizing on contact with warm air at normal atmospheric pressure. She was right.
She stepped away, letting Wyatt unscrew the rest. He spun the handle furiously now. Believing. Exposing more and more of the silver screw thread until it ended. He pulled and lifted a shaft of silver, gleaming metal out of the housing and then carefully laid it aside.