Flight deck — the Rorschach Explorer
Flying through the asteroid belt
September 4, 2019
As Rorschach’s orientation steadied and the ship’s acceleration abated, Morgan clamped his hands on Kiera’s wrists and guided them away from his face. With his head resting against hers, he said, “They’re gone, Kiera. It’s okay. It’s all over.”
Ajay unbuckled from his seat and scrambled toward Shilling, nearly toppling Carillo on his way through the flight deck door. He knelt beside Shilling and placed two fingers on the man’s neck. “He’s not breathing. There’s no pulse.” He rolled Shilling over and began to perform CPR.
Morgan left Kiera with Carillo, activated GEFF and dashed for the medical bay. He returned with a portable defibrillator and oxygen tank. For the next few minutes, he and Ajay took turns compressing Shilling’s chest and administering mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
“I’ve got a pulse!” Ajay said at last, his fingers on Shilling’s neck. “It’s weak, but it’s there.”
“Move out of the way.” Morgan halted compressions and pressed the oxygen mask over Shilling’s mouth. He felt for Shilling’s pulse. It was shallow and irregular. “Prep the defib.”
“Roger.”
Morgan unzipped Shilling’s flight suit down to his waist, tore open his T-shirt, and prepped the defibrillator paddles. “Make sure his GEFF is off.”
Ajay removed Shilling’s GEFF watch and deactivated the magnetic forcefield.
Shilling’s body began to float upward. Morgan pressed down on the paddles to push the stricken scientist back to the floor, then triggered the defibrillator’s shock.
He pulled the paddles away. “Check his pulse again.”
Ajay held the scientist down and put two fingers against his neck. “Still there,” he said. “Stronger.”
“Good. Julia, we’re going to float him to the med bay. I need epinephrine ready to go when we get there. We may not need it, but I want it ready just in case.”
By now Carillo had led Kiera over to the others. “Will you be okay?” she asked.
“Go,” Kiera said.
Carillo propelled herself toward the med bay.
“What can I do?” Kiera asked. She held out her hands and felt around blindly. “I want to help.”
Morgan took hold of her hand and guided it to Shilling’s wrist. “Walk with us. Feel for his pulse. Tell me if it drops.”
“Roger that.”
“Okay, Ajay, let him float up. You get his feet, I’ll take his shoulders. You ready, Kiera?”
“Yes.”
“Ajay?”
“Let’s do it.”
Dr. Kiera Walsh’s cabin — the Rorschach Explorer
No matter how many times Kiera blinked, darkness shrouded her vision. And the more she dabbed away the unending stream of fluid leaking from her tear ducts, the faster the fluid returned. Raw and throbbing, her eyes felt like hot coals burning their way into her head.
Curled into a fetal position on her bunk, she squeezed her eyelids tight and whispered, “This can’t be happening.”
Though she couldn’t see Ajay, she could hear him — the creaking of the bench he sat on, the long sighs that rose and fell like waves, the growls of his stomach. He hadn’t spoken much since escorting her here, and she considered his silence a blessing. She didn’t want his sympathy, nor was she capable of returning it. She just wanted to fall asleep and forget everything that had happened. She wanted to block out the feeling of hopelessness eating away inside.
Was Morgan right? Was her blindness only temporary? She supposed if she’d been able to see the look on his face, take stock of his body language, she might have been more reassured. But his usual steely confidence had seemed absent from his voice alone.
She couldn’t blame him. What a disaster — Shilling electrocuted, aliens invading the ship, hordes of UMOs in complete control of the ship’s speed and direction. Oh, and not to mention they’d lost all comms with Mayaguana, all their probes were gone, Carillo was talking to balls of light, there was another alien life-form lurking about…and the ship’s flight engineer was now completely blind.
Kiera sniffled and wiped away another trickle sliding down her cheek. The bench creaked, and she felt the weight of Ajay’s hand on her shoulder. He slid it along her arm until he reached her hand crooked beneath her chin. Wrapping his fingers around hers, he squeezed.
Under any other circumstance, Kiera would have batted his hand away, but now she lacked the strength to fight the gesture. Instead, in the icy darkness, she laced her fingers through his and squeezed back.
Ajay released a deep sigh, his warm breath rippling over their bonded hands.
Medical bay — the Rorschach Explorer
Morgan found Carillo seated on the edge of the examining table, staring at the wall, still dressed in her bloodstained clothes.
“I thought you were going to change your dressings.”
“Wasn’t feeling it,” Carillo said, her eyes still fixed on the wall.
Morgan looked past her to Shilling, strapped to another table. “How’s he doing?”
“Stable,” Carillo said. “His legs twitched a little while ago but he hasn’t woken up. How’s Kiera?”
“She’s shaken up, but she’s tough. She’ll get it together.” Morgan began to gather up items to re-treat and re-dress Carillo’s burns.
“What about her vision?”
“Don’t know. Time will tell.”
Morgan was betting — hoping — Kiera’s blindness was a temporary reaction to the brightness of the strobe-like bursts emitted by the alien life-form locked in combat with the BLUMOs. Those bursts had definitely had a sunlight quality, suggesting they contained ultraviolet radiation. If that was the case, and Kiera’s eyes hadn’t been exposed to the damaging rays for too long, she would probably recover her vision within a day or two. During that time, the best remedies available to soothe her sunburned eyes were cold packs and darkness.
“And Ajay?” Carillo asked.
Morgan snapped a covered tray to the table’s edge. “Lie back.”
Carillo reclined on the table with her legs draped over the side. Morgan guided her legs up and extended the table’s leg panel.
She looked up at him. “Um, hello…? How is Ajay?”
“He’ll be okay.”
She frowned. “Your face says otherwise.”
What the hell am I supposed to say? Morgan thought. That he’s nearly comatose with shock? It was amazing that Ajay had held himself together long enough to disable the autopilot thrusters and fire up Rorschach’s engines during the alien throwdown. Even more stupefying was how he rushed to Shilling’s aid moments after the scientist was stricken, despite the potential risk of getting zapped by the BLUMOs himself. Morgan had heard tales about the uncommon valor exhibited by the least likely of soldiers during the heat of battle, but he’d never personally witnessed such a display until now.
Yet Ajay’s courageous acts had come with a price. When the craziness on the flight deck had subsided, and his brain had the chance to soak in everything that had happened, Ajay just…shut down.
Would he rebound?
Morgan planned to give both Kiera and Ajay twenty-four hours to work through the shock, and then he would try to rally them. If they were able to break free from the BLUMOs, it would be a long journey back to Earth, and he would need them both.
“That was a lot for Ajay to take in,” he said. “Hell, it was a lot for me to take in.”
Carillo gripped his hand. “It was a lot for all of us.”
“Yeah, well, it’s over now…I hope.”
“Me too.” She let go of Morgan’s hand and looked over at Shilling. “They didn’t mean to hurt him. I’m sure of it. They were just trying to protect her.”
“I do want to talk about your new friends, but we need to take care of your burns first. Can’t afford to risk infection. How’re you doing pain-wise?”
“I wouldn’t say
no to a reload.”
“Okay, we’ve got two options. I can inject you with morphine or we’ve got topical lidocaine. If your pain is primarily coming from the burns, I’d suggest going with the lidocaine. It’ll keep your mind clearer than the morphine will.”
“Paul, there’s not an inch of my body that doesn’t hurt, inside or out.”
“Got it. Morphine it is.”
Morgan uncovered the tray and retrieved a syringe from its strapped-down contents. He slotted its needle into the medication port inserted into the back of Carillo’s hand and injected the pain medication.
After a moment, Carillo smiled, and her eyes closed. “Oh, that feels much better.”
Morgan exchanged the syringe for a pair of scissors. “So, do you still want to do this yourself, or should I?”
She opened her eyes and laughed. “Go ahead. Everyone else apparently got a peep show the first time around. Might as well make it a clean sweep.”
“I’ll drape you as best I can, but I don’t want to contaminate your wounds.”
“Don’t worry about it. Modesty is real low on my priority list right now.”
Morgan first strapped her hands, feet, head and waist to the table. Otherwise as soon he cut away her magnetic clothing, she would float in the cabin’s weightless atmosphere. Then he used the shears to slice open the center line of her shirt.
“Tell me about the UMOs,” he said. “I take it the white light was the she you keep mentioning. The BLUMO queen?”
“I don’t know if she’s the queen, but she definitely seemed to be the one in charge,” Carillo said.
“How does she communicate with you?”
“It’s weird. It’s not like I hear voices in my head or anything like that. I just have thoughts pop in my mind. You know, not my thoughts, but hers.”
“What kinds of thoughts?”
“They’re simple. Direct.”
Morgan gently peeled back the two halves of the rust-stained shirt and pinned the floating pieces of fabric underneath Carillo’s arms. There were two bandages near her shoulders and another just below her breasts. Blood had soaked through all three. He removed the first of the bandages.
“What do you mean by simple and direct?”
Carillo described the string of thoughts that had filled her consciousness when the UMOs first woke her. Get up. Hurry. It’s coming.
Morgan stopped in the middle of cleaning the wound. “They woke you up? How?”
“They zapped me again,” she said.
“What? Where?”
“Forehead. Right above my eyes.”
Morgan leaned over to examine her forehead. “I don’t see any burns. It’s not even red.”
“It hurt, sort of like a really bad headache, but it didn’t last long. When it was over, I opened my eyes and saw them. Then came the thoughts. Her thoughts.”
Morgan applied antibiotic ointment to the wound and covered it with a fresh bandage. As he moved on to the next one, he recalled how Nick Reed had inexplicably awoken from a brain-dead state with the ability to communicate with the UMOs. Had he received a similar UMO wake-up call?
“And you can answer her?” he asked.
“Have to keep my thoughts short and sweet, but yeah.”
Morgan recalled a comment Reed had made in one of his Cetus Prime video logs: I asked them to take us home, but it looks like they thought I asked them to take us to their leader.
“She didn’t understand you when you told them to leave the ship,” he said.
“That’s right. How did you know?”
“You were kind of locked in on each other. The white light kept flickering.”
“It’s not easy to communicate. I had the same problem when I asked her to end the ramming and spinning of the ship. She kept answering…get away. Then when I tried to tell her to leave, I couldn’t get through to her. I kept thinking…go away. She kept answering back…get away.”
“How did you finally get the message across?”
“I got angry. Told her they were hurting us.”
When Morgan had finished treating and dressing the burns on Carillo’s torso, he cut away her sleeves and followed the same process with her forearms. Finally he retrieved a fresh tunic from a cabinet, loosened the straps holding her upper body to the table, and helped her slide on the new garment. Then he guided her shoulders back down.
“We’re in the home stretch,” he said.
Carillo looked down at her pants. “Am I wearing anything underneath?”
“Don’t know. Wasn’t part of the triage, remember? I passed out in the airlock.”
She pulled her waistband out a small way and peered down. “The indignity continues.”
“Relax. Keep ’em on. I can cut the pant legs to get to the burns. You can slip on a new pair after we’re all done.”
“Okay. Deal.”
Morgan cut the legs of Carillo’s pants from her ankles to upper thighs, then cleaned and dressed the burn blisters marring her legs at mid-thigh. As he worked, he told her about the reports from Mayaguana, including their speculation about why the UMOs had zapped her. He also briefed her on Ajay’s VLF recordings, Kiera’s conclusion about the two queens singing to each other and Shilling’s panicked attempt to escape.
“Geez, how long was I out?”
Morgan applied the last of the bandages. “Don’t know. I was out, too. I’d say the better part of a day.”
He retrieved a fresh pair of pants from the cabinet and handed them to her. While she changed from her tattered pair into the new ones, he removed the tray and turned to stow the leftover supplies.
“So what now?” Carillo asked.
“Good question. If we were free to maneuver, if we had comms, I’d shoot Augie a message and tell him we’re scrubbing and coming home.”
Her wardrobe change complete, she stepped up beside him. “We don’t have comms?”
Morgan shook his head. “We haven’t heard from Maya in quite a while. Under the circumstances, you can be sure they wouldn’t go silent on us. And I don’t think there’s a problem with our antennas. I think the BLUMOs are blocking any signals in or out.”
“They’re still with us?”
“Oh yeah they are. You can’t sense them?”
“No, but I haven’t really tried.”
“Well, we’re going to need you to try pretty soon. I’d hoped they’d disperse after the queen left, but they’re still out there, an enormous spinning ball of them with us in the middle…and they’re pushing the hell out of us.”
Morgan explained that the BLUMOs had accelerated Rorschach to a speed that would put them in reach of Callisto’s orbit within sixteen days — nearly two and a half months earlier than planned.
“How is that possible?”
Morgan shrugged. “Chalk it up to the freaky deaky bubble they create. And I have a feeling they haven’t even broken a sweat. They sped up when I turned off the engines.”
On the way from the medical bay to the flight deck, Morgan and Carillo detoured to check in on Kiera and Ajay and discovered their cabins were vacant. As they emerged back into the main corridor, they heard sounds of movement emanating from the rear of the ship. They followed the noises and came upon Kiera and Ajay in the storage room, in the process of offloading the supplies from Cargo-4. The blindfolded Kiera was on her knees, shifting containers to make space for the ones Ajay carried through the airlock.
Kiera turned her head in their direction. “Is that you, Colonel Morgan?”
Ajay ducked through the airlock carrying a large storage case. He smiled and put the case down. “It’s Colonel Morgan and Major Carillo.”
“What are you two doing?” Morgan asked.
“We’re prepping the Cargo for the VLF antenna install,” Kiera said.
“I see. How much more to go?”
“Hmmm. There were fifty-six cases when we started, so that leaves…fourteen more to go. Counting the one Ajay just put down.”
“You want some
help?” Carillo asked.
“No, we’re good. Thanks, though.”
“All right,” Morgan said. “When you two finish up, meet us in the ready room.”
“Roger dodger,” Ajay said with a quick salute.
As Morgan and Carillo turned to leave, Morgan mumbled, “So much for the need to rally them.”
A short while later, Ajay appeared at the door to the ready room. He turned back toward the corridor. “Just a little further, Kiera. Three more steps.”
“I’m fine. Go ahead in, I’ll be right there,” she said.
“Okay.” Ajay nodded to Morgan and Carillo and joined them at the conference table.
Kiera’s fingers wrapped around the door frame to steady herself, then she stepped into view as her free hand felt for the other side of the door. “Everybody in their usual places?” she asked.
“Yep,” Carillo said.
“Good. I don’t want to sit on anyone’s lap by mistake.”
She slid her hand along the wall, following it to the first corner and across the back wall. When she reached the next corner, she turned toward the table, stepped forward, and said, “Moment of truth.”
“A little to your—”
“Shhh, Elroy. I’ll tell you if I need help,” Kiera said.
With her arms extended, she reached for the chair she normally occupied. She hit it with the back of her right hand, and it swiveled away from her grasp. Edging her thighs against the table, she bent down and snagged the back of the chair on her second try. As she lowered herself onto the seat, she said, “Sorry for the circus act. I’ll get better at it.”
“Hopefully you won’t have to,” Morgan said.
“I like the way you think, Skywalker.” Kiera smiled. “Now, what’s the dealio?”
“Well, we’ve got some decisions to make.”
Morgan outlined their current situation. That the ship was still under the control of the BLUMOs, and they were heading for Callisto at a hyper-accelerated rate. That communication with Mayaguana was still out — whether that was temporary or not, he couldn’t tell. And that, with their probe fleet gone, they would have to rely on the supplies aboard the ship and those offloaded from the Cargos.
Magwave (The Rorschach Explorer Missions Book 2) Page 17