Neural Pulse, Pt. 1 (Fiction)

[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]

I tore myself from the dance between burning fuel and watching the altimeter to peer through a viewport. Jing’s profile hindered the view of the crater, its walls rising, encircled by a walnut-brown barren plain. The crests of the hills forming the crater rim gleamed bone-white, and deep within its sandstone-red base, the four-story high dome scintillated. It had been clad in hexagonal panels that reflected the star’s arctic-blue light like a kaleidoscope.

Jing smiled, and stroked the black bristles of his goatee. I focused back on the controls while monitoring our velocity. I burned half a second’s worth of fuel to dampen the descent. Every microscopic adjustment vibrated through the seat into my body; I barely needed the instruments for guidance.

Three hundred meters to touchdown. Two meters per second. The crater walls rose, hiding the dome like an inverted curtain. Jing craned his neck toward a viewport, drinking in the landscape.

One hundred fifty meters. One and a half meters per second. The ship accelerated in its descent, but I fired the thrusters in hundredth-of-a-second bursts to slow it. The altimeter dropped: seventy meters, fifty, thirty. I burned fuel, keeping the descent under two meters per second, until the landing gear touched down with a metallic screech that resonated through the cabin.

Seated at my four-thirty, Mara had turned toward me. She’d bared the whites of her eyes, pursing her lips as she waited for me to confirm her suspicions.

I cut the engine. I was checking the gauges, making sure nothing had broken, when the cabin shuddered with an indigestion. With a jolt, we slid downhill at an eight-degree angle.

I grabbed the controls. Hunched over to peer through Jing’s porthole. The slope that obscured the view of the dome—that carapace of hexagonal panels—was sliding away to the northwest.

Mara spoke over the metallic scraping sound.

“We’ve landed on a slope.”

“Thanks. I wouldn’t have realized otherwise.”

“Just making sure.”

“You’re distracting me.”

The tilt steepened to twelve degrees. One leg of the landing gear lifted a few centimeters then scraped back down the slope, while the other leg swept through the sandy ore like a breakwater. A waterfall-like roar resonated through the cabin.

I fired the thrusters for a second, which lifted us diagonally off the slope. We drifted in a parabola, moving away from the landing point—a trajectory that would roll us onto our side unless I righted the ship. I fired the lateral thrusters in bursts. On the altimeter and the velocity gauge, numbers scrolled past. For fractions of a second, I countered the roll from one side to the other, like damping the sway of a bell with gentle touches, until we were descending vertically.

Jing spoke over the roar of burning fuel.

“Solar panels, the dome cladding. And on the forecourt, caterpillar tracks.”

My right hand gripped the control, my thumb tensed over the burner button, as if I were an extension of the ship. I balanced the descent, guided by the cockpit’s vibrations while the indicators blurred. My instinct decided before I could even consider overriding it.

The landing gear touched down. The cylindrical stack of cargo bay, fuel tank, and cockpit settled, sinking us a few centimeters into the sandy ground.

The pad of my thumb rested on the burner button; my shoulders were still tense, lifted off the seatback, until I took a deep breath. The ground held.

I released the controls and wiped the sweat from my palms onto the suit’s padded kneepads. I unbuckled the crossed harness straps.

To my left, Jing met my gaze, smiling. His thinker’s forehead and the patch of scalp conquered by baldness, damp with sweat, reflected the indicators.

I glanced over my right shoulder at Mara. She had tucked her chin behind the neck ring of her suit. The look she shot me rebuked me for the landing, as if I had promised her a textbook descent. Had I promised her that? But a smile unfolded on my face all by itself. Just like a hundred times before, I had mastered gravity, plunged down the well that some rock titan sank into the fabric of space-time, but this time I’d managed it in a training ship.

I took the tin of mints from a compartment. I tilted my head back and shook the tin until three mints tumbled onto my tongue, refreshing it. I reached back over my shoulder to offer the tin to Mara.

“I would’ve preferred we hadn’t relied on luck,” she said.

“I’ve had rough landings before.”

Mara took the tin from me. She shook two mints onto her palm, picked one up between two fingertips like medication, and slipped it through the gap between her lips, stark against her pale face.

“If we’d capsized, could you have righted the craft?”

“We wouldn’t have capsized. I was flying her.”

“We would’ve needed to call for rescue. Then what?”

“We’ve landed, Mara. Breathe.”

I stood up as Jing unbuckled his harness. I made my way, hunched over, to the airlock hatch. Inside, on a sidewall, three spare suits dangled like deflated balloons. Curves of light skittered across the folds of the plastic material. The fabric shone golden from the shoulders to the gloves, down the sides of the torso, and along the outer legs, while the chest and inner thighs remained white.

I took down a helmet and seated it on my suit’s neck ring. When the lens interface activated, it projected data between me and the airlock wall, displaying my vitals in a blue font. I aligned the back of my suit with the oxygen tank feed. Engaged it. My helmet flooded with cool, light air, like the kind I’d breathed in the mountains of several planets.

As I pulled on my gloves, Mara and Jing jostled each other carelessly in the space where we could barely fit shoulder to shoulder. Jing apologized; Mara frowned. I checked the seal on the woman’s helmet. Her ashen gaze darted across my face. I ordered them to let the helmet intelligence run the suit integrity check. They scanned the results while I physically checked the seals on their suits where gloves met sleeves and pants met boots. Reflections from the overhead halogens slid across their helmet visors. I nodded.

When I pulled the lever to depressurize the atmosphere, the hatch to the cockpit slammed shut with the clang of an armored door. Hidden machinery hissed as it worked until the exterior hatch opened a crack. I pushed the hatch, maneuvered my body out through the opening, turning as I went, and my foot found the first rung of the ladder. I descended past the fuel tank.

Above me, the legs and boots of a suit, silhouetted against the violet sky, probed cautiously from rung to rung, as if fearing the next one might give way. When the curve of a landing gear strut emerged to the right of the ladder, I let go. I landed, kicking up dust.

The reconnaissance flights had led me to believe I had a grasp of the terrain, but from the ground, those hills, craters, and mountain horizons dwarfed me. The star, bottle-cap-sized, glittered an arctic blue, and when I gazed at it, the helmet’s visor tinted to protect my vision. I moved forward a few meters, my boots sinking into the sandy soil, toward the hill we would skirt. Beyond, the dome awaited.

I fidgeted like a dog waiting for a ball to be thrown. My racing heart sent a tremor through me, concentrating in my hands and feet. I wished I could have a shot of liquor to moisten my mouth.

I requested the helmet’s AI to project the map of the complex, and the AI displayed it in blue light onto the folds of sandy ground. It had extrapolated the aerial photos I’d taken of the complex into three dimensions, displayed on a grid. The hexagonal-paneled dome stood four stories tall, and in the forecourt, dominated by a smaller crater, several tracks crisscrossed like on a construction site.

I wanted to sprint up to the top of the slope and survey that carapace. It was as if I’d pulled up to the starting line of a race, waiting for the countdown to reach zero, anticipating the moment I would stomp on the accelerator.

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Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

Today’s song is “Everything in Its Right Place” by Radiohead.

It seems all those dozens of hours playing the original Kerbal Space Program paid off.