Neural Pulse, Pt. 10 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
Paralyzed, I choked. I sucked in a lungful of hot air and collapsed to my knees before the xenobiologist. I pressed my hands against his suit’s chest. I pounded on him. No one would recognize Jing from what was left of his blood-drenched face. I stammered, repeating, “no, no, no,” while my fingers traced the helmet’s dents, the jagged shards of the broken visor jutting from the frame.
Pooling blood submerged the ruin of bone and flesh that was his face. When I tilted Jing’s body, the helmet spilled a tongue of blood onto the stone floor, slick with sliding globules of brain matter.
I staggered back, fists clenched, shuddering violently as if seized by frost.
Jing’s right hand was clamped around the handle of an automatic core drill. Perhaps the xenobiologist had approached to help me.
I shut my eyes, covered my visor with a palm. I pictured Jing standing beside me, an echo asking if I needed help. No, I hadn’t killed him. When I opened my eyes, the corpse lay sprawled on its side, the dented helmet cradling the ruin of his head.
Jing hadn’t known he was dealing with a live nuclear device. The flood of that feeling had swept over me. Had I seen the xenobiologist stop beside me? Had I decided to smash his face in with the crowbar?
I stumbled about, gasping for breath. My brain felt like it was on fire, seizing with electric spasms. Red webs pulsed at the edges of my vision, flaring brightly before fading. Before I knew it, I’d crossed the room that contained the construction robots, and was sprinting up the ramp. The oval beam of my flashlight jerked and warped, sliding over the protrusions and crevices of the rock face. My arms felt like spent rubber bands, especially the right, aching from fingertips to shoulder blades. Every balancing lurch, every push against the rock to keep climbing, intensified the ache.
I passed the first sublevel. My breath fogged the visor; I saw the flashlight beam dimly, as through a mist. My hair, pulled back at my nape, was soaked through, plastered to my skin.
I burst onto the surface, into the emptiness of the dome. I staggered, kicking through the sandy earth. I gasped for air and ran. I pictured myself training on a circuit—something that relaxed me at the academy after piloting, just as going to the gym with Mara relaxed me on the station—but now I was running from the consequences, from an earthquake tearing the earth apart like cloth. If I slowed, the fissure would overtake and swallow me.
I vaulted over the embankment to the left of the esplanade, where I’d hidden before, landing on my knees and one forearm. I scrambled backward, kicking up dirt, and pressed myself flat against the embankment’s exposed rock face.
The radio. I navigated the visor options until I muted my comm signal. When the notification confirmed I was off-frequency, I jammed my fists against my knees, my mouth stretched wide in a scream.
I drew a ragged breath. Beads of sweat dripped from my forehead onto the visor; the material wicked them away, like water hitting hot pavement. Mara would have reached the cockpit by now, found me missing. Nothing could make Jing’s death look like an accident. How would my friend look at me? What would she think when she found out? She’d think… because I killed the xenobiologist… I might kill her too.
I buried my helmeted head in my forearms. I welcomed the dimness. How had I let this happen? I knew I should have destroyed the artifact—just as I knew I had to fight back when those shadows grabbed me, tried to rip me open with their claws. I’d struck the shadows with the crowbar before I’d even consciously decided to. On other expeditions, while waiting for scientists and soldiers to emerge from some dense alien jungle, I’d monitor their radio chatter, trusting my instincts to warn me if I should suggest aborting the mission. Just as piloting was like flowing in a dance of thrust and gravity, the way dancing came naturally to others, I imagined. Now my instincts screamed at me to flee, to run from this embankment away from the ship, to strike out across the planet, heedless of survival. My instinct had been supplanted by another. And I knew the difference.
I peeked around the side of the embankment. The scarred esplanade remained deserted. The crystalline dome watched the minutes pass like some ancient ruin.
If Mara found out the artifact made me kill Jing, maybe she’d understand the danger, agree to destroy it. I was counting on her reasoning, on that cold logic that had so often irritated me. But if I waited too long to face her, she’d suspect my motives.
As I straightened up and stepped, dizzy, onto the esplanade, an electric spike lanced through my neurons, blurring my vision. I stumbled around until it subsided. I stopped before the central crater, hunching over to examine its charcoal-gray cracks and ridges. Crushed bones.
I activated the radio. The visor display indicated it was locking onto Mara’s signal. She’d see mine pop up, too, unless she was distracted. In the center of my darkened visor, the arctic-blue star shone through the thin atmosphere like a quivering ball of fluff.
“Where are you, Mara?”
“Cockpit.”
The shadows intercepted the transmission, projecting their hatred at me. It distracted me from Mara’s tone—was there suspicion coloring her voice? I waited a few seconds. Would she demand an explanation? Why was she silent?
“Good,” I said. “Stay there. I need to talk to you.”
As I climbed the slope skirting the hill towards the ship, the reality of my decision hit me. I was about to lock myself in the cockpit’s confined space with Mara. Her shadows would envelop me, sink their claws into my skin, force themselves down my throat to suffocate me. I wanted desperately to rip off my helmet, wipe the sweat from my face. I needed a shower, a moment to think.
I located the ship’s tower. Several meters ahead lay three cargo containers and scattered tools. Inside the cargo hold, chunks of the robots and the materializer were heaped like scrap in a landfill.
I scrambled up the boarding ladder to the airlock hatch. Opened it, scrambled inside, sealed it shut. The chamber pressurized with a series of hisses and puffs. I unsealed my helmet. Holding it upside down, steam poured out as if from a pot of fresh soup. I gulped the ship’s cool, filtered air and opened the inner door to the cockpit.
“Mara.”
Empty. Indicators blinked. On the monitors, ship status displays and sector topographical maps cycled. Lines of text scrolled.
My seat held a roll of electrical tape. As I turned it over in my fingers, an electric jolt made me clench my teeth, squeeze my eyes shut. My neurons hummed.
The door to the airlock chamber clicked shut with a heavy mechanical thud. The thick metal muffled the hissing. Leaning back against my seat’s headrest, still clutching the tape, I froze. The air grew heavy. The cockpit lights seemed to dim, the edges of my perception closing in. A dozen shadows waited in the airlock chamber, their concentrated beams of hatred probing the metal door, seeking to burn me.
The door slid open.
I tensed, lips parting. What could I possibly say?
Mara emerged sideways through the gap, head bowed. As she stepped through, she shouldered the door shut behind her. The glowing diodes and bright screens of the control panel glinted on her helmet’s visor. She whipped around to face me. Her right arm shot out, leveling an electroshock lance. The two silver prongs at its tip lunged like viper fangs.
-----
Author’s note: I originally wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.
Paralyzed, I choked. I sucked in a lungful of hot air and collapsed to my knees before the xenobiologist. I pressed my hands against his suit’s chest. I pounded on him. No one would recognize Jing from what was left of his blood-drenched face. I stammered, repeating, “no, no, no,” while my fingers traced the helmet’s dents, the jagged shards of the broken visor jutting from the frame.
Pooling blood submerged the ruin of bone and flesh that was his face. When I tilted Jing’s body, the helmet spilled a tongue of blood onto the stone floor, slick with sliding globules of brain matter.
I staggered back, fists clenched, shuddering violently as if seized by frost.
Jing’s right hand was clamped around the handle of an automatic core drill. Perhaps the xenobiologist had approached to help me.
I shut my eyes, covered my visor with a palm. I pictured Jing standing beside me, an echo asking if I needed help. No, I hadn’t killed him. When I opened my eyes, the corpse lay sprawled on its side, the dented helmet cradling the ruin of his head.
Jing hadn’t known he was dealing with a live nuclear device. The flood of that feeling had swept over me. Had I seen the xenobiologist stop beside me? Had I decided to smash his face in with the crowbar?
I stumbled about, gasping for breath. My brain felt like it was on fire, seizing with electric spasms. Red webs pulsed at the edges of my vision, flaring brightly before fading. Before I knew it, I’d crossed the room that contained the construction robots, and was sprinting up the ramp. The oval beam of my flashlight jerked and warped, sliding over the protrusions and crevices of the rock face. My arms felt like spent rubber bands, especially the right, aching from fingertips to shoulder blades. Every balancing lurch, every push against the rock to keep climbing, intensified the ache.
I passed the first sublevel. My breath fogged the visor; I saw the flashlight beam dimly, as through a mist. My hair, pulled back at my nape, was soaked through, plastered to my skin.
I burst onto the surface, into the emptiness of the dome. I staggered, kicking through the sandy earth. I gasped for air and ran. I pictured myself training on a circuit—something that relaxed me at the academy after piloting, just as going to the gym with Mara relaxed me on the station—but now I was running from the consequences, from an earthquake tearing the earth apart like cloth. If I slowed, the fissure would overtake and swallow me.
I vaulted over the embankment to the left of the esplanade, where I’d hidden before, landing on my knees and one forearm. I scrambled backward, kicking up dirt, and pressed myself flat against the embankment’s exposed rock face.
The radio. I navigated the visor options until I muted my comm signal. When the notification confirmed I was off-frequency, I jammed my fists against my knees, my mouth stretched wide in a scream.
I drew a ragged breath. Beads of sweat dripped from my forehead onto the visor; the material wicked them away, like water hitting hot pavement. Mara would have reached the cockpit by now, found me missing. Nothing could make Jing’s death look like an accident. How would my friend look at me? What would she think when she found out? She’d think… because I killed the xenobiologist… I might kill her too.
I buried my helmeted head in my forearms. I welcomed the dimness. How had I let this happen? I knew I should have destroyed the artifact—just as I knew I had to fight back when those shadows grabbed me, tried to rip me open with their claws. I’d struck the shadows with the crowbar before I’d even consciously decided to. On other expeditions, while waiting for scientists and soldiers to emerge from some dense alien jungle, I’d monitor their radio chatter, trusting my instincts to warn me if I should suggest aborting the mission. Just as piloting was like flowing in a dance of thrust and gravity, the way dancing came naturally to others, I imagined. Now my instincts screamed at me to flee, to run from this embankment away from the ship, to strike out across the planet, heedless of survival. My instinct had been supplanted by another. And I knew the difference.
I peeked around the side of the embankment. The scarred esplanade remained deserted. The crystalline dome watched the minutes pass like some ancient ruin.
If Mara found out the artifact made me kill Jing, maybe she’d understand the danger, agree to destroy it. I was counting on her reasoning, on that cold logic that had so often irritated me. But if I waited too long to face her, she’d suspect my motives.
As I straightened up and stepped, dizzy, onto the esplanade, an electric spike lanced through my neurons, blurring my vision. I stumbled around until it subsided. I stopped before the central crater, hunching over to examine its charcoal-gray cracks and ridges. Crushed bones.
I activated the radio. The visor display indicated it was locking onto Mara’s signal. She’d see mine pop up, too, unless she was distracted. In the center of my darkened visor, the arctic-blue star shone through the thin atmosphere like a quivering ball of fluff.
“Where are you, Mara?”
“Cockpit.”
The shadows intercepted the transmission, projecting their hatred at me. It distracted me from Mara’s tone—was there suspicion coloring her voice? I waited a few seconds. Would she demand an explanation? Why was she silent?
“Good,” I said. “Stay there. I need to talk to you.”
As I climbed the slope skirting the hill towards the ship, the reality of my decision hit me. I was about to lock myself in the cockpit’s confined space with Mara. Her shadows would envelop me, sink their claws into my skin, force themselves down my throat to suffocate me. I wanted desperately to rip off my helmet, wipe the sweat from my face. I needed a shower, a moment to think.
I located the ship’s tower. Several meters ahead lay three cargo containers and scattered tools. Inside the cargo hold, chunks of the robots and the materializer were heaped like scrap in a landfill.
I scrambled up the boarding ladder to the airlock hatch. Opened it, scrambled inside, sealed it shut. The chamber pressurized with a series of hisses and puffs. I unsealed my helmet. Holding it upside down, steam poured out as if from a pot of fresh soup. I gulped the ship’s cool, filtered air and opened the inner door to the cockpit.
“Mara.”
Empty. Indicators blinked. On the monitors, ship status displays and sector topographical maps cycled. Lines of text scrolled.
My seat held a roll of electrical tape. As I turned it over in my fingers, an electric jolt made me clench my teeth, squeeze my eyes shut. My neurons hummed.
The door to the airlock chamber clicked shut with a heavy mechanical thud. The thick metal muffled the hissing. Leaning back against my seat’s headrest, still clutching the tape, I froze. The air grew heavy. The cockpit lights seemed to dim, the edges of my perception closing in. A dozen shadows waited in the airlock chamber, their concentrated beams of hatred probing the metal door, seeking to burn me.
The door slid open.
I tensed, lips parting. What could I possibly say?
Mara emerged sideways through the gap, head bowed. As she stepped through, she shouldered the door shut behind her. The glowing diodes and bright screens of the control panel glinted on her helmet’s visor. She whipped around to face me. Her right arm shot out, leveling an electroshock lance. The two silver prongs at its tip lunged like viper fangs.
-----
Author’s note: I originally wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.
No comments have been added yet.
