Mom? Are You Here? #2
“Brace! Brace!” comes my mother’s voice. I open my eyes to a new darkness: thick smoke, grays riddled with blacks. “My wiring is on fire. I do not know how much longer I can speak to you.”
When I cough, the individual lines of pain from my feet connect. I’m a bright and bloody net of pulsating nerves. The ship rotates, sending me tumbling through the smoke as wall becomes ceiling becomes floor.
I’m being pulled. Rover is yanking me somewhere.
A horrible rending sound, and then the hull shakes, the walls increasing their spin. The smoke clears as a cold wind passes through the ship. Not the explosive torrent of an opened airlock, but the breeziness of a neglected room that’s gone crumbly around the windows.
We have a draft.
A spaceship should not have a draft.
“OS!” I cry.
There’s no reply. Lights click out, click on, click out.
Rover releases me and scuttles elsewhere in the ship.
The smoke clears enough that I can see my bunk.
The last thing OS asked me to do was brace, so I should brace.
I manage to drag myself onto my bed, to fit the restraining belt over my body.
The ship’s lights are milky behind the polluted air.
Even in the chaos of the moment, I notice that the belt is polycarb—it must have been reprinted on board.
It, too, is covered in a layer of the rusty alien moss.
The ship pitches, thrusting my body against the belt, stretching the material thin before I fall back against the bed.
I spit out the stomach acid in my mouth. Smoke fills the air again, the stench a combination of burnt rubber and something indescribably primal. A sort of high-octane freezer burn.
Then the wind is back, blowing through the ship. I gasp as fresh air hits my face.
Contrails in the ship.
A spaceship should not have contrails.
It no longer pitches side to side—instead I’m pressed flat against the bunk, my lips drawing away from my teeth as the g-forces increase. Then it starts rotating, and I’m hurled against the restraint, against the wall, against the restraint, against the wall.
My blood feels solid, entering my heart as a stream of bullets and leaving it just as violently.
My veins balloon and collapse, balloon and collapse.
Whether it’s from the pain or the pressure, my thoughts fragment, go to beaches and Minerva and the hulking stranger half glimpsed in the strobing emergency lights.
Throughout it all are the voices of my mother and me and someone named Kodiak, all fighting for my attention.
I dream of Titan, of descending toward black lakes of liquid methane, the only lights in the soupy atmosphere from the lamps of my craft—oddly enough, a submarine. Ambrose, the black lakes cry in Minerva’s voice. Race me to the point. Find me in here. Bring me home to you.
When I blink awake again, the air is clear. Something that might be moonlight edges the ship’s surfaces in pearly tones. Walls rise around me unbroken, though the ceiling is gone. Gulping against the throbbing pain in my skull, I lean out from the bunk.
The hallway leads not to the next chamber, but to stars. An astounding bath of lights, swirling through a twilight sky. Clouds wisp before them.
Clouds. Atmosphere.
We’ve crashed. We’ve crashed and the ship has opened like a nutshell.
A breeze whistles through jagged edges. A speaker crackles.
Is OS trying to talk to me? I look toward the sound.
OS isn’t trying to talk to me. The crackling is a fire.
It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen outside of a laboratory.
A low green glow dances on the walls of the ship.
It’s a faerie fire, but even so I can feel the heat wafting up from it.
When the night breeze hits the flames, they rise to greet it, rippling up like a sheet unfurled over a bed.
The composition of gases in this atmosphere must be different than Earth’s, to produce fire that looks like this.
The alien moss is flaming. The flaming is spreading.
Move, Ambrose!
My hands flutter over the restraining belt, struggle to release the buckle.
I frantically jab at the release, but it’s jammed.
I yank at both stretches of polycarb, hoping to rip them.
But if the restraint held during a crash landing, it’s not going to part under my puny arms. I force myself to pause.
Think, Ambrose!
I rest against the bunk. Now that the pressure against it is off, the release clicks open.
Oh.
I roll off, try to get to my feet and fail, instead tumbling across the floor. I get two hands onto the bunk’s surface and pull, managing to drag myself into a kneeling position.
I’m already light-headed. My blood pressure must still be low. I’d better give up on standing.
Instead I scramble toward the stars, the hallway bending in my vision and then straightening as I reach the ship’s torn lip. The orange portal dangles in the night air. Its edges are frayed, ringed in polycarbonate spikes. I gird myself, then leap between those teeth, into the night sky.
My legs buckle, rolling me down a slick slope. I come to a stop, half in water—or not water, I soon realize, something goopier than water. I lie back, staring into the chill night sky and its unfamiliar stars. I will not pass out. Not on this unknown planet with its unknown dangers.
There’s something like a smiling cat face in the sky, pointed ears and open mouth and teeth.
It’s a constellation of stars, of new stars.
The first myth of this new world. Hello, Sky Cat.
I wrap my arms around my suit. It’s cold here—not instant-cell-damage cold, but I’ll need to get into warm clothing quickly.
I soon discover the source of the light. It looks like a full moon, but it’s both too small and too bright. It’s a distant sun.
At that pale distance it can’t be the sun this planet is orbiting, or I’d be frozen solid by now.
The main sun must be on the other side of the planet, in its nighttime.
We’ve landed on a binary solar system. Sagittarion Bb, the second “b” for its second sun.
The myth grows. Sky Cat and its Two Star Pets.
I rattle my head. “Kodiak?” I risk calling into the night.
When there is no answer, I imagine alien predators lurking toward me, all the horror reels I’ve ever seen mashing together in my imagination. Tentacles and fangs and slimy embraces.
But there’s only the breeze. No other sounds of life. I might be alone here. We might be alone here, if Kodiak survived the crash.
The only other human in the universe. “Kodiak!”
How big is this planet? Does it have anything we can eat on it?
How long will this night last? Will the breeze kick up into a superstorm?
I wasn’t trained in any of the answers, because I was sent on a false mission.
Given what I’m seeing, I can only assume that what my recorded voice told me is true.
I won’t let this planet master me. I’ll find a way forward.
Think, Ambrose. Unless they sent me here just to die, which would make this the most expensive execution in history, mission control must have provided the information I’ll need to survive this exoplanet somewhere within the ship. “OS,” I call. No answer.
I pick myself out of the puddle and, flailing like a new surfer, manage to get to my feet.
The landscape is low and almost flat, heathered in soft moist growths that I can’t quite distinguish in this dimness.
In the scant starlight, I can see the devastation that the ship’s crash wreaked on this unsuspecting planet.
Two giant skid marks shine, lit up from within by some sort of phosphorescence riled up by the friction—I assume from a microorganism that lives in the soil.
More evidence of life. The shining strips point far into the distance; the ship skidded a long way before coming to rest here.
“Kodiak?” I call again. I have a suspicion where he is, though. One skid mark leads to the broken piece of ship I woke up in. The other disappears into a dark pond before reappearing on the far side. The ship must have broken into two. Kodiak is in the other half. If he’s alive at all.
Though all my mind tells me is pain, pain, pain, I try to bully it into logic.
Priority one is to get warm clothing, preferably a spacesuit, since who knows what foreign organisms or spores might already be making their way into my body.
I have to find a way to hydrate. And I have to track down Kodiak.
Well, well, Minerva. Looks like I’m mounting an extraterrestrial base camp rescue after all.
The Endeavor will never be a ship again, that’s for sure.
The wreckage is open on three sides, and whole chambers are missing, probably strewn across this planet.
I find no spacesuits in the debris, but there is a broken helmet—it looks gouged by a tool, strangely enough, more than just damaged in a crash—and in the dim sunlit night I find a supply of blankets, all piled together.
I band my arms and legs and torso with them, fastening them with the polycarb-printed restraints from my bunk.
I wrench a pipe from the wreck to use as a support, and start along the glowing path toward the other half of the Coordinated Endeavor, calling out Kodiak’s name as I go.
I’m short of breath as soon as I start, and it only gets worse.
At first I think it’s my body responding to the trauma of my wake-up and then crash, but then I realize because of the low oxygen I’ve now probably got altitude sickness on top of my body’s other current complaints.
At least there’s nothing left in my stomach to come up.