by John Jakes
A tsunami of light came roaring out of the cloud, a blazing visual overload that slammed into his tiny ship with the same force it slammed into his over-amped vision.
What?
It was like being tossed in a champagne glass full of burning light-bubbles, and it overwhelmed everything else, left his brain screaming for mercy and his heart climbing into his throat.
He fought the controls as the monstrous wave broke over him, pounding breakers of energy that tossed his tiny vessel about like a kernel of popcorn in a microwave.
Sweat bloomed on his brow, ran down into his eyes, further blinding him. A great crescendo of sound battered at his ears. He bared his teeth and hung on until, just when he thought he couldn’t take it any longer, the vast, frightening wall of energy rushed on past, vanishing as quickly and mysteriously as it had come.
In the strange, ringing silence, he looked out on a swath of once-again peaceful space, and saw, distant and glimmering, the flicker of Pericles’s beacon. Hope filled his chest like a breath of cold, clean mountain air. He scrabbled for the comm switch, adjusted it, saw he had a clean link to the Oberon again.
“Oberon I’ve got a visual on Alpha pod. Over!”
He couldn’t tell if the energy wall had damaged his craft, Alpha pod, the Oberon, or even all of them. But it didn’t matter, because the result was the same: another wash of static across his screens and from his headset. Nothing like a reply. For all intents and purposes, the Oberon had vanished, and he was alone.
Not a good feeling.
I’ve still got a mission, he told himself as he locked his course once again on Alpha pod. For a fleeting moment he wondered if Pericles was still alive. Had the monkey been battered by the same light wave that had pulverized him? What would Pericles have done?
Probably panicked and tried to hide under his chair…
Poor little monkey.
Another wave of light came billowing up from the cloud, roiling and boiling, and when it had passed, the disaster was complete. Out in the dark and the black, where Alpha pod had been at least a flickering, beckoning dot of hopeful light, Davidson now saw nothing. The pod was gone.
How can it be gone?
Didn’t matter. It was.
“Oberon! Come back…?”
Nothing but ominous silence.
“Oberon…? Come back…”
He might as well have been a mouse, squeaking into a hurricane.
No Alpha pod. No Oberon.
And now, to his horror, yet another tidal wave of energy roaring in, bigger, thicker, like light somehow turned into superheated honey…
He fought the controls, but knew it was no use.
The wave hit…
2
The wave of force slammed into Delta pod like a hammer made of frozen light. Davidson felt it first as a slow heaving that lifted his craft, then began to shake it like a wolf with a rabbit in its teeth.
The shuddering vibrations surged and tore at him. He could feel the muscles in his back stretching, threatening to rip away from his spine. He closed his eyes, gritted his teeth, hung on…
Then it stopped. Just like that, nothing…
Davidson opened his eyes just in time to see everything on his control systems go dark. The blank, black monitor gleamed at him, as empty as the eye of a corpse. The silence stunned him. Then, as he realized what it really meant, panic clawed through his brain.
No sound. No engine noise. No hum of powerful heaters protecting him against the endless, killing cold of space. No whisper of air, cool, filtered air, whooshing into the compartment. Into his lungs…
His throat locked on a scream. He pounded on the controls with all the force he could muster, hoping that something had shorted out, that maybe he could slam it back, reestablish connections, make everything work again.
Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a sight that chilled him to the marrow of his bones: on the cockpit window, a single crystal of ice appeared, glittering like a flawless diamond. For an instant the crystal simply hung there. Then, spreading out from it, appeared tiny, glassy tendrils, like a spiderweb weaving itself across the window at hyper-speed. He stared at the ice web in horror; outside Delta pod, the ambient temperature approached absolute zero, minus 454 degrees Fahrenheit; without his heaters working, it wouldn’t be long before the interior of the pod matched that chill. Cold enough to freeze human flesh to the consistency and brittleness of glass in a few seconds.
The thickening web of frost reached the edge of the cockpit window and kept right on going, coating every interior surface with a congealing skin of frozen moisture. Finally the effect reached Davidson himself: the air inside his helmet abruptly turned into white fog. The tip of his nose burned, then went numb. He could feel his eyelashes grow stiff, heavy with ice. His helmet’s faceplate first misted over, then went opaque as the coagulating air coated the high-impact pressure plastic like a shroud.
With the engine gone and the controls useless, Delta pod began to tumble. Without power the tiny craft was nothing more than a tin can with a human filling… a human filling about to be flash-frozen like a tin of freezer-burned sardines.
Davidson began to gasp. It felt as if he were trying to fill his lungs with snowdrifts. Reflexively, he cried out for help.
“Oberon… come in, Oberon…”
But there was no answer. Only the darkness creeping in from the edges of his eyes, from the edges of his brain. Death by freezing. He’d always heard that was an easy way to go. You just went to sleep…
No!
From somewhere he found a final reserve of terror-driven strength. He twisted in his seat, flailed at his helmet, felt his own blows as soft, distant thuds. Fading away…
Encased in his deadly icy coffin, Davidson didn’t see the monstrous eruption of energy exploding from the heart of the digital cloud like a nuclear blast, this time roaring toward Delta pod as if some secret intelligence were guiding it like a weapon. The ravening discharge reached the tiny craft and swallowed it whole.
Everything that had happened before was like a love tap. Delta pod slammed first one way, then the other, trapped in the force fields like a dust mote in a tornado. Davidson felt gravity jerk him viciously in several directions at once. His helmet tried to twist itself off his head. A crushing weight slammed into his chest. He felt his ribs trying to spring loose. As the last dregs of his consciousness began to fade, he felt a curious lassitude. So easy to just let go, give up, let the darkness carry him down and down in the cold silence of his ruined craft.
Suddenly every piece of equipment in the pod flared back on. The controls beeped, flickered, hummed. The atmosphere system began to whir. Heated air gusted into his eyes, melted the frost on his faceplate, tilled his laboring lungs with blessed warmth. His fingers and toes began to tingle.
The control monitor screen crackled with bursts of static, then cleared into sharp relief. The craft’s digital time readout was spiraling crazily out of control, running with breathtaking speed backward, forward, then back again. Then it simply shattered.
Davidson stared at the clock and wondered what that meant.
He felt his heart rate slowly retreating toward normal. He flexed his stiffened fingers, was relieved to discover that everything still seemed to work. But just as he was allowing himself to hope that maybe he might yet survive this ongoing disaster, he glanced out the pod’s window and saw the wheeling stars stretch into elongated needles of light.
The rush of forward acceleration crushed him against the back of his chair once again. Alternating waves of light and darkness rolled across his vision, gradually fading to a complete absence of light. At first he thought something had short-circuited in his battered brain and blinded him. But then a blue halo appeared, vast and glowing, like a gigantic bull’s-eye into which he was inexorably tumbling. The blue halo wavered, then faded into a continuous rippling rush of blue and purple, coupled with the gut-wrenching sensation of an endless plunging fall.
This
had all been in silence. Now, unexpectedly, he heard a faint whispering hiss that rapidly grew louder. He looked around, trying to discover the source, but had no luck. Yet the sound was familiar—a leak in Delta pod’s hull? The sound of the last of his oxygen bleeding out into empty space? Then he realized: it was the sound of the air displaced by his passage through an atmosphere.
The thought stunned him. Only moments before, he’d been in deep space, no planet within light years. And yet somehow there was air around him now, grinding against his hull, slowing him, heating up the exterior of the pod.
A quick glance out the window confirmed it: the tiles of the heat shield on the nose of the pod were white hot, shading into a dull, burning red farther back. Flames leaped and spurted the length of the hull. And now thick, greasy black smoke began to boil from the interior vents, a choking miasma that rasped down his throat and seared his lungs.
Going down too fast, gonna fry like a Cajun catfish, he thought wildly. He groped for the control panel, hoping to fire the retro rockets and slow his reentry— reentry where, damn it?—but the panel was so hot it burned the skin on his fingers. He could imagine the delicate mechanisms beneath the panel—now melted into useless slag by heat they were never designed to withstand.
Great, Davidson thought. Now I’m falling onto a planet whose existence is impossible, locked up in what is basically a burning brick…
And the impossible planet really was out there: through the window he could see the vast, curving roundness of it, shading off at the edges into the dark blue of atmosphere. Below him wheeled huge, whirling expanses of deep, forest-colored green, jungle-choked continents surrounded by sapphire-tinted seas, all beneath serried ranks of white, sun-sparked clouds.
The whole mess was rushing up at him as if he’d driven Delta pod over the edge of a thirty-mile-high cliff.
The next several minutes were hectic. Though knowing it was probably futile, Davidson tried everything he could think of to regain some measure of control over the pod. The friction of the atmosphere had slowed him enough that maybe there was a chance. Thank God the heat shield had performed as advertised. It had soaked up enough energy and then dissipated it in harmless flames that the pod’s outer surfaces hadn’t been destroyed. Aerodynamically, the craft had about the same buoyancy in flight as the average jet plane. But if he could get the engines going, or at least get the thing falling belly-down, he might stand a chance.
Sweat carved pallid trails through the black, smoky grease that coated his face. He worked frantically, one eye on the landscape roaring up from below, and in the final moments of his descent, he thought he just might make it.
Time shattered into a series of instantaneous visual snapshots: breaking through the clouds; the jungle below, amorphous greenery suddenly coming into focus; the flash of water, off to the right somewhere; the trees growing, growing…
The pod shrieked in final agony, tortured far beyond its design specifications. Then he could see the tops of the trees, and then, with a bone-cracking jolt, he blasted through the jungle canopy and smashed onto a broad expanse of water.
The pod skidded across the water like a skipping stone, throwing up a long, white rooster tail that sparkled in the sunlight. He heard the hull of the vessel creaking and groaning as superheated metal and ceramic hissed into cool, deep water.
Then his forward motion stopped, and the pod began to sink. Automatically he reached for the lever that would blast open the hatch lock. He yanked hard, heard the mechanism activate, but nothing happened. He lunged forward against his restraints, trying to see what had happened. The door had cracked open, but only a little. The outer hinges, obviously melted, had prevented the hatch from fully opening. And now cold, murky water was pouring into the pod. He glanced out the window, saw nothing but water and a few streams of rising bubbles. Delta pod was completely submerged.
He didn’t think of himself as a coward, but the thought of drowning in some alien sea, trapped like a rat in the ruined pod, almost sent him around the bend. Panic and terror drove his muscles like pistons, gave him strength he never knew he had as he thrashed about, trying to free himself.
Finally his fingers found the ejection seat release, curled around the red steel handle, yanked it with all the power he had left in him. The cockpit door exploded soundlessly, releasing a boiling torrent of bubbles. The same explosion booted Davidson in the rear so hard he thought his spine had been driven through the base of his skull like a railroad spike.
He blasted through the cloud of bubbles like a torpedo, still strapped into his ejection seat, slashing through the turbid water until finally the pressure slowed him enough to let him move. He clawed frantically at the straps and snaps of his flight suit until he was able to tear the constricting garment away and free himself.
His lungs felt like they were about to explode as he thrashed toward the surface. He was at the very end of his endurance when he finally bobbed like a cork into the life-giving air and sunshine.
Heaving and gasping, he gulped in oxygen as he splashed around, his waterlogged clothing trying to drag him back under. After a while he got himself oriented, looked around, then began to swim awkwardly for the shore. When his feet scraped bottom he tottered to his feet, staggered the rest of the way onto a thin strip of muddy ground, and fell flat on his face in the brooding shadows of ancient, towering trees. Only the faint, slow rise of his chest in the muck showed that he was still alive.
For the time being.
* * *
Darkness…
The raucous chatter of birds. A blaze of light against his closed eyelids, pink and burning. The smells of mud, decaying vegetation, and a faint whiff of bitter smoke in his nostrils.
His head was pounding. Davidson lay still, feeling as if he’d just gone ten losing rounds with a world-champion heavyweight. Finally he groaned, rolled over, opened his eyes.
He winced as sun glare sent needles into his tender eyeballs. It took several seconds for his vision to clear. He sat up, groaned again as every overstretched muscle, every scrape, every fresh bruise sent out a chorus of agonized protest.
That was a mistake, he thought as he looked around slowly.
He was on the edge of a wide slough, the sunlight bouncing off the water so brightly he had to turn away, temporarily blinded by the glare. Across the narrow, muddy strip the jungle began. From here, it looked impenetrable, a wall of high, green foliage so dark it was almost black. The spaces between the thick, waxy brown trunks were choked with weeds, brambles, and thick-leafed undergrowth. He saw sharp flashes of color in the canopies of the trees, and heard strange-sounding cries; birds, he thought, but no birds he’d ever heard before.
In some ways everything seemed normal enough, but he couldn’t shake the sensation that everything was also utterly strange, that everything he saw— trees, flowers, birds—was all somehow different from anything he knew on Earth. Yet he couldn’t quite put his finger on what that difference was.
Maybe, once he got his wits back, figured out what had happened to him…
He wobbled to his feet and nearly fell back down when a wave of dizziness swept over him. But he held on, just barely managed to keep his balance, and finally, still swaying slightly, took another look at his surroundings from his new vantage point.
Nothing much had changed, though his vision seemed clearer, and his hearing was definitely sharper. He stared at the ominous wall of greenery, at the flickering shards of color as he listened to the soft flap-flap of bird wings, and in the distance, another sound, a woodsy kind of crunching noise, not immediately recognizable.
The scene was, in its own weird way, reassuringly peaceful… until he realized what the crunching noise was. Something big, moving through the forest. Moving in his direction.
A blood-chilling scream split through the soft hum and buzz of the other sounds like a cleaver through his skull. He jerked back, startled, and swiveled his head back and forth, trying to locate the source of the terrifying shriek.
He couldn’t see anything, but that didn’t matter. He was a USAF pilot—a trained military man. Old reflexes kicked into gear. First rule about the approach of possible danger: Get your ass under cover, and do it right now!
To an amateur, it might have seemed crazy to run toward the jungle and the source of the possible threat, but there was no cover on the muddy beach—only in the trees, and if the trees concealed danger, the thick underbrush might also provide a hiding place and safety from that same danger. Davidson didn’t consciously think about any of this. He just put his head down and moved.
He reached the tree line with a few long, lunging strides and didn’t slow at all as he crashed through into the underbrush. The instant shift from the bright sunlight of the beach to the shadowy green dimness of the forest momentarily disoriented him, but he recovered quickly as his eyes adjusted. The adrenaline of panic had supercharged his senses. He still couldn’t see much, though every shadowed movement, even the wind through the leaves, raised his anxiety level another notch. His nose didn’t tell him anything useful at all. His surroundings smelled like any other old-growth forest choked with rotting mulch and flourishing undergrowth. That left his ears, which had brought him warning in the first place. He froze for an instant, straining hard, listening intently. There were no more screams, but…
Yes! It took some effort to sort it out from the background noises of birds and breeze-rustled leaves, but it was there: in the distance somewhere but growing closer, desperate, gasping breaths; the soft thud of running feet; the scrape of bodies against branches, and… the chink of metal? That had a familiar feel to it, but he couldn’t quite place what it reminded him of.
Not just one body, either. Lots of bodies.
What the hell…?
The muffled clamor seemed to be loudest off to his right. That made his decision easy. He crossed his arms over his head, hoping to protect his eyes, and began to thrust through the packed shrubbery toward his left.