5. Kalith
KALITH
Saved by the intergalactic whipped cream.
Iwas top of my engineering class. Handpicked for this mission. I would not watch this ship tear itself apart. Vantor had given me the command. Our survival depended on me.
I pulled my brown and rust mottled appendages from the cavity; the cover I wore on my differently shaped arm caught at the edge of the compartment.
I yanked it free, rolling over quickly and rising on eight of my tentacles to scurry across the rippling, gelatinous floor.
I had barely ten triple heartbeats before I needed to enter the correct combination of orders on the control console or the safety foam wouldn’t deploy in time.
Too late, and the impact would kill us. Too early, and the foam would soften too early. That would kill us too.
The timing had to be perfect.
No room for error.
And Cyro was in my way, his monochromatic tentacles flailing against the interface again, doing absolutely nothing except spreading viscous connection fluid everywhere.
He looked odd void of color. I’d grown used to it, even decided it suited him, though I’d still tease him now and again about looking like my grandmother.
“Move!” I rasped, launching from the floor and pushing Cyro from the seat.
He slid sideways with a snarl of frustration, his tentacles releasing the console he was futilely clinging to, his arrogance crumpling into stark uncertainty.
If there was time, I’d enjoy the sight of him losing control. His panic mirrored my own.
The vessel shuddered, hurling me forward. I crashed my prime manipulator into the glitching control panel; jolts of diagnostic data rained through me; hot shards of information I didn’t want to pierce my nerves. It was distracting, throwing my mind off my mission.
The stench of burning bio circuits stung my chemoreceptors, and I reflexively unfurled a protective membrane over my eyes, turning the chamber around me into a dark blur.
“Initiating crash sequence,” I yelled over the ship’s organic screaming.
“Manually changing angle of descent.” My voice sounded mechanical even to me—confidence forced into being.
Panic was a virus; solutions were the cure.
Our survival odds increased exponentially if we hit at less than thirty degrees tilted.
Three tentacles whipped toward the emergency tool hatches baked into the bulkheads.
Two braced me against another feral lurch.
My left-posterior limb twitched uselessly—its protective tip cover hanging, damaged from me brutally pulling it free from the compartment.
Its color never synched with the rest of my body.
Right now, it was brightest coral, whereas the rest of me displayed muted, determined hues.
I gave my atypical limb a small shake, telling it to cooperate for once.
But it had never held me back. And it wouldn’t now.
Sometimes, it was exactly my difference which helped me rise above.
Like the time I’d found the shape of my left posterior limb fit perfectly inside the cavity of an air filtration channel on a mission.
The stocked filters were square, we required round.
I was able to shape my limb around what we had and hold it in place long enough to get us home.
I stretched farther, body rippling with the color of wet soil and decaying leaves, iron in my mind blasting past every boundary.
My body became a stretched, contorted mass touching what must seem like random points inside the cabin.
I curled one tentacle around initiator knob one, then another around knob two.
Two tentacles reached to the floor, lifting small panels to reveal red ring pulls, both of which I jerked to an open position.
One tentacle touched the ceiling, pressing at its center, activating a system-wide stop to auto-functions so I could fully be in control.
I took a deep, settling breath and turned them simultaneously before instantly inputting the first code sequence.
Afterward, my tentacle tips flew across the input panel.
Even the shortened arm had its job, hovering over the blinking button that needed pressing right before the quad lever pull.
The emergency protocols were standard issue; an operator had to be in peak condition, with full command of their faculties.
I should have made some programming changes before take-off.
I hadn’t, and there wasn’t time for on-the-fly customizations while our ship plummeted toward an alien planet.
I could handle this, and I knew the expansion foam would work.
I’d designed it myself. I wasn’t too happy that its first real test in the field was on my personal mission though.
"Kalith! Status?" Vantor barked from somewhere behind me.
"Safety protocol engaged!" I called back, my voice steadier than my insides felt. "Brace for impact—gelatinous cushioning deploying in five seconds!"
The blunt tip of my posterior left limb pressed the blinking indicator, and then I yanked down the four yellow emergency levers: the final step.
“Brace for impact!” I roared as a countdown began on the pulsing panel. The ground was coming closer… closer… closer.
At the last moment, I put in another code.
The one that would shut down everything in the ship right before collision.
With some luck, it would protect the important systems from aftermath surges.
From the few diagnostics I’d successfully run, it was already going to be a nightmare to recover from the current damage, not even counting what would be mangled upon collision with the planet.
“What are you doing?” Cyro came into view, lengthening his body as tall as possible and looming over me. I had no idea how he was staying upright as the ship rocked back and forth violently.
“Safeguarding the ship!” I shouted.
“Cancel that code,” Cyro demanded. “With everything powered down, the crash won’t send the automatic distress signal!”
“With everything powered on, we risk frying systems we can’t repair,” I argued.
“I’m the leader of this mission—”
I cut him off, not bothering to point out that Vantor had assumed control. Cyro knew; he simply preferred to ignore reality. “We’ll manually set the beacon after surviving.”
What else could I protect? What was the most important thing to preserve?
Sliding off the chair, I stretched my gelatinous body around the base of the control panel.
The interface surface was important, but the neural network beneath was far more precious.
I could repair the display, but I highly doubted this planet would have synthetic fiber flesh and laboratory grown nerve pathways.
My coloring shifted to a mottled tie dye of evergreen and dark soil as I felt resignation flood into my digestive cavity.
I’d done all I could. We’d either survive or die.
“What can I do?” Vantor hollered, dropping into my sightlines, his own boneless body, skin swirling with alert hues, flattening against the floor.
“Protect the environmental system,” I ordered, as if I was in charge.
I never was. I was good at following orders.
Good at lightening the mood. I didn’t like to call the shots.
Right now, though, I was the only one who could give us hope of leaving this planet after crashing.
That made me the king of this plummeting paperweight.
Vantor nodded, slipping away quickly. I watched as he wrapped his own body, sucking in air to create protective cushioning pockets beneath his skin, around the quad tanks that kept the ship survivable for our bodies.
The circuitry I encircled throbbed against my body, sending tremors into every part of me.
Once a vibrant, vital organ keeping our ship ‘alive’, it now had a staccato, choked pulse that threatened to give out at any second.
Blotches of black scar tissue marked dead nodes between cerulean pathways still clinging to life.
The sensory suckers of my tentacles explored the minor and major damage.
The central processor core was charred, its organic matrix vaporized.
Total corruption. But beneath the growing darkness, I sensed the light and lifeforce that meant the ship wasn’t past saving.
We could revive the brain and get the heart pumping again even if it took on more damage.
We could survive this.
We could take flight again and get home.
Yet it wouldn’t be easy.
It would test even my remarkable talents.
This wasn’t a localized fault—this was systemic.
The damage had spread through backups, through tertiary processors.
The navigation neural web was annihilated.
Cyro was right; I must have missed crucial effects of that solar flare, some catastrophic fracturing that I could have repaired had I caught it in time.
Earlier, I hadn’t checked. Everything was too chaotic. Now…
I risked a direct link—something I’d refused to do earlier, choosing instead to gently probe hundreds of system sections at random.
But now I pressed my central tentacle’s neural pad against the main diagnostic port beneath the console.
Electronic screams flared in my mind as data dumped itself into me.
Every corrupted pathway, every singed junction mapped themselves across my nerves. I tasted despair at a cellular level.
“It was the solar flare,” I croaked, voice hollow as I withdrew, sending spikes of phantom pain ricocheting through the linked appendage.
“That K-class star we scoped yesterday—its radiation ripped the matrix to shreds. Shields. Scanners. Communication. Navigation’s molecular scaffold…
all gone. I don’t know why it waited until we were this close to the planet to truly fail. ”
Silence. Then Vantor’s tight inhale. Cyro dropped into view; his iridescence dwindled into ashen white.
“Can you fix it after we’ve landed?” Cyro’s words were weak.
Landed. He deliberately used that term.