Andromeda Expedition
Carlos Arroyo González
Copyright © 2021 Carlos Arroyo González
All rights reserved.
To my parents
Earth
The hand always outstretched, the rifle always loaded.
New West Infantry Motto
Three weeks after killing Bruce, Captain Fox Stockton lit a cigarette. Before sucking in the smoke, he dropped it and crushed it with his worn black leather boot. The tobacco was scattered on the white tiles of the balcony like a small sandy island in the middle of a pale ocean.
A shiver ran through him as a blast of frigid air blew in from the mountains. He bundled up in his thick army coat and returned inside his apartment, closing the sliding door behind him. Even indoors he would not take off that heavy, rough coat, as heating was a luxury he had long since been unable to afford. In the depths of winter, sometimes during the night a layer of frost would form on the TV screen (an old model, ten times cheaper than modern holovisors), which he kept as a decoration, or as a herald of the times when an hour of light did not mean sacrificing one of the day's meals.
And above the television, on a cork board, the colorful mosaic of the insignia he had received for his services throughout his career. Medals that apparently were enough to soothe the consciences of the rulers of the New West. When he was expelled he thought of selling them. He soon found out that they were worth no more than a collection of beer caps.
He allowed himself to place a small birch log on the stove, an old model of twisted, rusted iron. He lit a couple of paper balls made from the pages of an outdated newspaper, and when he was sure the flames had caught on the log he closed the stove's little door. Through two thin slits he could see the inferno inside. In the gloom of the apartment, the light filtering through the grates gave the stove the appearance of an insane robot. He guessed his own appearance must had been very similar when he took out Bruce.
Sinking onto the couch, rocked by the heat of the stove, his mind wanted to drag him back to that episode. He had carried it inside his chest for almost a month, and instead of forgetting it, he had the impression that it was getting bigger and bigger, like a night growing from the bottom of an abyss. He remembered above all the expression on his face, his open mouth showing a grotto of despair, and the look of disbelief in his eyes as Fox stuck him with the pocket knife with which he was peeling a shriveled apple.
He remembered the blood dripping onto the pocket knife plunged into Bruce's neck like a five interdollar Excalibur, and how it trickled through Bruce's fingers spilling in spurts onto the flowered shirt and lottery ticket.
He watched stunned as Bruce fell to his knees and finally to the ground, lying motionless. A blackish puddle spread around him on the floorboards, varnishing them with his final agony.
Fox remained like that for a few seconds, unable to react. A draft through the balcony door brought him to his senses. He closed it. Then dialled the police number. A part of him, the part that tried to keep him safe from himself, quickly assessed the situation. Even if he managed to prove that it had not been premeditated... Because it hadn't been after all, had it? An outburst, an almost unconscious impulse, a misstep. Things happen, amigo.
Before the first ring could be heard, he hung up.
He glanced over his shoulder, hoping that the body wasn't there, that it had all just been a bad trick of his mind, brought on perhaps by intense nicotine withdrawal. But sure enough there it was, lying on his left arm, bent over his back. Like a magician hiding a card. Fox looked at the old closet he used to store old books and papers. He had found it in the alleyway leading to his apartment. Mr. Yun, the only one who had cared about him since he started living a rung above begging (apart from Bruce, of course), had tipped him off, while with one hand he stirred chestnuts and with the other pointed to the cupboard that someone had abandoned in a corner: “Bargain for you, friend.”
Without giving himself time to back out, he placed it on the floor and opened the doors. He dragged Bruce's body and shoved him in there, bending his legs and arms, impregnating the old closet with his friend's fetus, as if someday the closet might expel him in a new birth.
His rickety car was on a narrow street where rarely anyone passed by. However, he thought as he unloaded the closet from the wheelbarrow and stowed it in the trunk, he was sure the police would catch him without too much trouble. He had not been, what could be said, a neat and careful killer with attention to detail. All he had to do was ring a bell and proclaim his feat through the streets of Koi City, dragging behind him his trophy stuffed in the worn cabinet.
Murderer. That was the word boiling in his head as he drove. A word that could well belong to some exotic language, or to another universe. Those were the kind of words you saw on the crime pages, in the most gruesome sections of the news. Words like victim, criminal records, stabbing. Things that had nothing to do with him. Nothing at all. He turned the radio up full blast and kept it on for the rest of the drive, feeling the rumble shake the thick fabric of his army coat.
In the woods by the turnoff to Bradley Falls, Fox stopped the engine, which silenced with a gurgling rumble, much like the one Bruce had produced while holding his neck, as if by doing so he could make the span of cheap steel across his windpipe disappear.
As he stepped outside, this he remembered well, he caught a whiff of pine mixed with some kind of chemical. Ammonia? With his hands freezing, more from guilt than cold, he began to dig. On his right hand there were still traces of dried blood. Not a couple of drops. The hand was smeared with his friend's blood. At that moment he knew that when the lights of the patrol car appeared through the trees he wouldn't even bother to open his mouth.
As he dug he didn't bother to wonder how he had been able to do such a thing. He just dug. The sound of the shovel against the earth calmed him in a way. It was something tangible that filled his mind. In the silence of the night, the nibbling of the shovel on the damp earth of the forest was his only advocate. And rocked by its comfort he dug a hole much deeper than necessary. He took the last possible shovelful before he was trapped down there, as if Bruce, in a posthumous revenge, had come out of his stale wooden grave and buried him. Fox dragged the cabinet, which, falling into the hole, thundered like a judge's gavel.
Returning to the apartment he had scrubbed with bleach the sofa and the floorboards where Bruce had fallen, and all those places where there might be any debris to incriminate him. Driven by terror, he finally scrubbed the entire apartment thoroughly. When he finished he lit a cigarette and stretched out on the couch, waiting for a visit from the police.
It never came.
But that dark secret, manacled in the cellar of his chest, swelling like a corpse in its wooden box, seemed to gradually take over his body and mind. A darkness that was expanding and spilling over like a huge black waterfall, filling everything with water so deep it could hold a leviathan.
At work the incidents had been limited to minor “disciplinary infractions.” At least that's what his file said. Except, of course, the day he broke Captain Swanson's nose and three ribs. That episode was nothing like a “disciplinary infraction,” let's say. It was more like a case of “I'd have taken that guy out if they'd let me have a little more time with him”.
When he lost his job he became a surly and sullen man, and started giving Jessica a hard time. Even to Emily.
Within a few months, his wife invited him to leave home.
“Until dad gets better, right?” Emily had said.
Fox's blood ran cold every time he thought about it.
After the murder he withdrew further into himself, retreating into the cellars of his inner self to bail out the dark water
that flooded every crease of his body in a vain attempt to prevent the leviathan from appearing. He had lost contact with the outside world. He didn't even know what the gunshots he heard out there from time to time were due to. But the truth was that he didn't really care. He just kept bailing, one bucket after another. The problem, of course, was that for every bucket he bailed, two more seemed to spill out, bringing water that was darker and more poisonous than the last.
The echo of a gunshot brought him back to reality. Soon after it was followed by a short burst, dry and sharp as a sentence. He got up to stoke the fire that was already beginning to languish and looked at the old wall clock that held a photograph of Emily from the day of her fifth birthday. In the picture she was holding a cone with a huge ball of chocolate, and she had smeared her nose and dress. He remembered scolding her that day, though not too much.
“And how do you want me not to stain myself?”, she had replied, looking at him as if he were stupid. “I’m not a wizard.”
The day Fox left home, as he saw Emily in the rearview mirror crying and kicking, with her mother holding her so she wouldn't run out after the car, he felt guilty for having scolded her for that stupidity, and thought that at that moment he would give everything he had left so he could give his daughter hundreds of ice creams and let her smear herself as much as she wanted.
His toes were so cold that he had to wiggle them a couple of times to make sure they were still there. He made coffee. As he sat down, his left knee sent a flash of pain, sharp and dazzling as lightning.
He threw the cup (one on which the sign “Stefano's Pizzeria. Always on point!” surrounded a pizza with a slice missing) against the corner where the stove stood. As it shattered against the wall a dark stain appeared and the smell of coffee pervaded the apartment, as if somehow the cup had been enough to contain it.
Sinking onto the thousand times patched felt couch, the same one on which he had ended his friend's life with the ease with which a moment before he had peeled that wormy apple, he decided that enough was enough. He would start by finding out the reason for the riots in the streets, the shootings and so on. Get up to date like a normal person. He lifted one of the felt cushions from the couch and examined the inside of the envelope he kept there. The envelope was white, but between the drips of oil and continued handling (sometimes he hoped that by checking the contents one more time, another ten interdollars would magically appear out of nowhere), it had taken on a yellowish hue and a crunchy texture. There were the same forty-three interdollars that were there when he checked it the night before, under the candlelight the same color as the envelope, as if it had been infected by the shade of the candle. He stuck two uncertain fingers in and fished out the three interdollar bills. They were crumpled and seemed to tremble as he brought them to the surface, though of course, it was his fingers that trembled.
Good evening. Prepare to hear what no one else is going to tell you.
Mysterious Universe Headline Quote
General Amiens was peeing while trying to hit a piece of paper that had stuck to the side of the toilet. He felt a sharp pain that cut off his stream and wondered if that would be what it felt like to have a kidney stone. That damned microwave popcorn, he told himself, downplaying the fact that at meals he accompanied every handful of salt with a bit of food.
He returned to the operating room. The walls were covered almost entirely with monitors and control panels. Several technicians milled around an open panel from which a tangle of wires spilled. Around it, since six o'clock the previous morning, the number of crumpled coffee cups had been increasing, as had the mountain of cigarette butts in an ashtray with Alter BioScience advertising on it. The beeping of satellites, the constant murmur of static and transmissions as a perpetual background murmur. The gloom of the room was only broken by the glow of the screens, and above all by the bluish glow of the huge holomap that dominated the center of the room. That glow illuminated his chubby cheeks and large moustache under a bulbous nose pearly with sweat. The holomap represented an almost six-foot recreation of Earth. The holographic forms of the Old Europa fleet floated around the planet. Amiens was studying the optimal disposition for what lay ahead. But every time he activated the simulation the battle was over in a few hours. He reached out a hand to loosen the knot of his tie but found that he had already untied it.
Officer Brighton entered the room. He had not shaved for at least three days, and the purplish rims under his eyes announced that the hours of sleep during that time could probably be counted on the fingers of one hand. On his white shirt there was a huge coffee stain.
“A call from Isaac Norton, sir.”
“Isaac Norton? Isn't he the lunatic who used to host the Mysterious Universe television program or something?”
“Yes, sir, he says he might have important information.”
Amiens squeezed his eyes with his thumbs. It was surreal. But he really had no other options. They had exhausted them all except to die. So there was nothing to lose by having an absurd conversation with an eccentric "researcher of the occult," as he called himself.
“Hand it over. And put something stronger in this coffee.”
Isaac Norton's face replaced the globe. Tousled hair framed a pale face. He wore an open bathrobe. Amiens was grateful that the camera did not show anything below the chest covered with a clump of black hair sprinkled with a few gray hairs.
“You have one minute before I close the connection,” Amiens said.
“Well, you see, the thing is, I have some contacts. They give me all kinds of useless information. But sometimes...”
“Fifty seconds.”
“Yes, yes, yes, yes.” He held his head in his hands. He stood up and rummaged through the bookshelf behind him. Numerous books and papers spilled everywhere. Finally he picked up a crumpled piece of paper. It looked like a hamburger wrapper. On it was something scrawled in black marker. Amiens was so dumbfounded that his finger didn't flinch when he gave the command to move to the button to close the connection.
“Here it is. Apparently, in the early stages of the universe there arose a civilization far more intelligent than any that has existed since.”
Amiens' finger, now, positioned itself on the close button and stroked it.
“Get to the point,” he said.
“For thousands of years the luminarians had great problems with the termens. The ones you call parasites. After keeping them at bay for centuries, they were defeated because of the treachery of one of their generals. Well, that battle took place in orbit of a planet in the Kentor-VI System called Erebus. In the main spacecraft they carried the pinnacle of their technology. A device capable of synthesizing neuroaxial micro currents and translating them into the plane of spacetime.”
“What are you talking about, lunatic?”
“A thought-sensitive device that made it possible to transform reality from the electrical currents of the luminarians' brains. They could do anything they could imagine just by thinking about it. From repairing a spacecraft to vaporizing an entire fleet of termens.”
Amiens' eyes lit up.
“New West knew about it and sent an expedition. The official version was that they were going to investigate the possibility of life on Erebus, but the truth, as you may have guessed, is quite different. They wanted to get the neural catalyst for their own purposes. But the expedition never returned. Communications were interrupted for unknown reasons. I'm sure the neural catalyst is still there.”
He waved the hamburger wrapper at the camera, waving whatever was written on it as irrefutable proof.
“I'll tell you what I think,” Amiens said. “I think you're crazy as a loon. But you're lucky: right now we have nothing else, and the countdown is coming to an end.”
“I knew you'd believe me.”
“Don't get smart. But right now I need every last one of our spacecrafts to stop those monsters. The resistance is hanging by a thread.”
“That won't be a problem,” he
took a swig from whatever was in a red mug with a smiley face drawn on it, and let out a dry burp. “I've been working on a project. A new toy.”
Amiens felt like he was in a dream. He expected that at any moment a line of chimpanzees would appear parading by, holding hands or something. Or maybe it was what Brighton had poured into the coffee. He looked at his watch.
“I'll tell you what we're going to do. You bring me that thing and I'll bet you'll know what wealth is.”
We know what you need better than you do. You'll forget you're wearing them!
Edelmann Coporation advertisement
The alley in which his doorway was located was barely ten feet wide. Dirty, damp and full of graffiti and overflowing garbage cans. In addition to Stefano's Pizzeria, there were a few stores where you could find the latest technology at lower prices. Not only because it was mostly stolen merchandise, but also because they were second-hand items. And this combination, when talking about implants, was not a very pleasant subject to think about, especially from the customer's point of view. But it was the only thing that could make Fox dream, even if it was a long shot.
This meant that there were mostly desperate people and drug dealers with a good nose for desperate people.
Apart from Stefano's and the second-hand implant stores, there was Mr. Yun, at the head of his chestnut stall. More than once he had relieved his hunger for free when it had become unbearable. He had never seen anyone buy a single chestnut from him. Fox thought that he did it more as a hobby than as a business, since he couldn't explain why the man was there enduring cold and rain, without receiving a single customer. It was as if he refused to leave his position for fear of losing it, as if someone else might be interested in occupying that dark and damp corner of a forgotten alley in Koi City. Fox guessed there was something else, some underlying reason he had never dared to ask him. He always wore a short-sleeved tank top (Fox sensed that he always wore the same one), whether it was hot or snowing like in the Himalayas. Occasionally he would give him advice, which Fox suspected he made up on the spot. At first he thought it might have a convoluted, hidden double meaning, or that it was so lofty that an ordinary human couldn’t grasp its abstract complexity. They were things like "The highest mountain does not always hide the sunset." Or "He is not the wisest who knows the most but he who knows what Wisdom is." Gradually he accepted that good old Yun was imagining them as he went along. His imagination perhaps facilitated by the bottle of cheap vodka that always dozed between his feet, like a lazy cat. Anyway Fox always thanked him for his advice as if it were life-changing phrases.
Andromeda Expedition Page 1