Furnace (3 page)

I took a deep breath and flexed my palms to keep my voice from faltering. “Yes, sir,” I said, and then left the bridge without another glance out the viewport. I didn’t want to see the planetary-mass object any more than I was required to under the captain’s orders. It was an ugly rock, and it wouldn’t be long before I discovered just
how
ugly it truly was.

“All hands prepare for an emergency landing,” Captain Gibbons’ voice echoed down the corridor. In the darkness, with nothing but the backup lights to guide my way, he sounded devilish. Haunting. Mischievous. Grating. Every negative emotion I’d felt in my entire life balled into one miserable weight in my stomach.

In other words, I had a bad feeling about Furnace the moment we laid eyes on it. And it only got worse from there.

CASUALTIES

“Get a doctor!” Martavius, the shipswain, yelled.

“Which one?” someone responded. I can’t remember who.

“I don’t fucking care! She’s not breathing!”

The stasis chamber was crowded. All of Sergeant Salib’s soldiers had run from the armory across the hall to see about the commotion. They were trained to search for wounded on the battlefield, and to their credit, they responded swiftly and efficiently despite being in various states of surface-detail prep. It wasn’t their fault they were too late.

Marty’s wife, Latricia, never woke from hyper-sleep. Neither did Patrick the sous chef (a generous term for someone who heats frozen blocks of protein), or half the engineering team. The ones who’d been left in their pods a little longer because there was nothing they could do to help our situation.

Later, I would reflect on the seven deaths that occurred in the stasis chamber and realize that the hyper-sleep tubes had probably fried at the same time navigation went offline, but it doesn’t really matter. There’s no justification for senseless death. It’s just a part of the experience in deep space. You grow numb to it, and you thank God that, this time, it wasn’t you. That may make me sound like more of an asshole than I’d like to be, but it’s the harsh truth, and it’s my only comfort now.

Before I could process the flurry of activity around me, before even my extensive combat training kicked in and drove me to my wounded crewmates, Sillinger pushed roughly past me and squatted beside Marty’s wife. Apparently, he’d already patched up Teemo’s arm.

“She won’t wake up?” He wiped sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his undershirt. He was a pale man. Always in the throes of some illness or another, whether it was a cold, flu, or general disagreement with the artificial atmosphere, but there was no doubting his skills as a field medic. He was equally artistic with a rifle and a laser scalpel, but the latter was often more useful. Like most of Ronia’s squad, he was a rookie in terms of experience, but his composure rivaled most fleet officers I’ve served under.

“She’s not even breathing!” Marty yelled, grabbing Sillinger by the shirt.

Marty was usually a cool customer, as far as I could tell. In his right mind, he would have realized how stupid it was to physically accost the one man on the ship capable of saving her life, but he was understandably shaken.

Sillinger pushed Marty away and unfastened the medical scanner from his belt. “There’s a med-kit in the armory with an auto defibrillator.”

Charlotte Rayford, a lanky, fair-skinned sniper from the infantry, nodded emphatically and exploded through the doorway to the locker room across the hall.

“Marty, I need you to hold Latricia’s head up, okay? She swallowed a lungful of stasis fluid when the systems shut down and I think it’s solidified in her chest. We need to keep her upright and try to break up the fluid so she can breathe.”

Marty calmed considerably, glad to have something to keep his hands occupied. Glad he felt like he was doing something to save her. One look into Sillinger’s eyes, though, and I knew it was too late. And not just for Marty’s wife Latricia, who I hadn’t spoken a word to since we’d launched from Earth. No one had even
attempted
reviving the others from stasis. I guess we were all scared the same thing would happen again. It turned out that our instincts were correct, but that doesn’t excuse the fact that cowardice was primarily responsible for our paralysis.

Anyway, we all knew Latricia was dead. If she wasn’t breathing, then she’d aspirated the stasis fluid into her lungs. Even if she could have been revived at that point, she’d either wind up dying of pneumonia or suffer such extensive brain damage from the lack of oxygen that she’d be in a vegetative state indefinitely.

To his credit, Sillinger did everything he could. Mostly for Marty’s sake. Charlotte reappeared with the med-kit shortly after, and the rest of us just gaped in stunned silence while they tried the defibrillator before turning to a few less archaic field treatments from the kit. Nothing worked, and Marty’s desperate pleas to no one in particular grew higher-pitched and more gut-wrenching with each passing moment. I felt like I’d swallowed a bowling ball, but I couldn’t take my eyes off him.

I left before it was over. Not because I was too yellow to hear Sillinger’s pronouncement or because I wasn’t a good enough man to help Marty through the ordeal, but because I had a job to do. If we didn’t figure out how to fix the ship soon, I reasoned, we’d all be following Latricia into the great nothing. I was determined not to let that happen.

And I’d never been so scared in my life.

I found Sergeant Salib waiting at the airlock door, SX rifle at the ready, flanked by a half-dozen soldiers in combat suits eagerly awaiting active duty. Combat gear, mind you, is considerably less cumbersome than the bulky plates set aside for the ship’s navigator. It’s not so bad once you get used to it—hell, I actually
prefer
it to the infantry reg suits nowadays—but I still wasn’t used to it then. I made a mental note to let
them
do most of the actual work, since my hands wouldn’t grip the relay conduits as well as they could with their mildly adhesive gloves. The infantry gloves are designed so soldiers can steady their rifles easier and rattle off accurate shots, but everyone on the ship winds up using them at one time or another, whether for something actually practical like staying attached to the ship on spacewalks, or as a tool for bad practical jokes. I’ll let your imagination do the work on that rather than take the time to explain, but I will say even a mild adhesive can pull off a hell of a lot of body hair.

“What are
you
doing here?” Sergeant Salib scowled.

“Captain’s orders, sir,” I answered.

“Captain’s orders? How the hell is a nav rat gonna fix the ship?”

I shrugged because I wasn’t sure about it myself. Probably the captain just wanted me off the bridge for a while so he could think, or maybe he’d seen my record in the infantry and wanted an extra gun in case something bad went down. I couldn’t imagine
why
, actually, but I guess that’s why he was the captain. “He says you could use the help since half the engineering crew is down, sir,” I lied, careful to avoid the word ‘dead’ even though I’d just seen the vitals on the stasis pods up close and personal. I don’t think Captain Gibbons even knew about them yet, but it seemed logical enough to me.

“Fine,” Salib relented. “Just stay at the back of the line. We’re running a tight perimeter until we know what’s out there. The goddamned sensors are blind.”

No shit
, I thought. “Yes, sir.” Sometimes people forget that the navigation systems are only slightly lower on the power relay hierarchy than life-support and helm controls. If
my
screen goes dark,
everyone’s
screen below bridge level should be dark. It’s just the way the fleet prioritizes. Life support so you’re around long enough to get creative on escape routes, then helm control for evasive maneuvers in case you’re under attack, then navigation so your getaway ride doesn’t crash into the side of a moon. From there, the list is up for a little more interpretation based on the computer’s assessments. You know, whether the situation necessitates weapons, electropulses, etc. All that’s to say that the grunt workers are a low priority while the ship is off the ground, especially aboard the
Rockne
. We had two measly shuttles and no fighters, all damaged in the flare, so even combat pilots wouldn’t have done us any good.

Salib’s twelve soldiers formed a tight line in front of me. They listened intently as she ran through her check-downs and assigned mission priorities, which mostly consisted of singling out the half-dozen boot-troops too slow with a hover-wrench to perform repairs, then instructing them to just watch for trouble and make sure their weapons were pointed away from the ship. Real rousing stuff. I didn’t pay much attention to the logistics because I
was
good with a hover-wrench, but Salib’s delivery had exactly the amount of invigorating venom and irritation you would expect from a Sergeant addressing her troops.

“Nav rat,” she shouted back to me once her speech was complete and her troopers had begun powering their weapons.

“Yes, sir?”

“Stay the hell out of the way and do whatever you’ve gotta do in a hurry.”

“Yes, sir.”

She glared at me with dark eyes that could have swallowed me whole. They might have with another moment or two. I was given a reprieve, however, when she pressed a button on her shoulder and the arch of the glass-domed helmet snapped into place over her head.

The countdown on the airlock began. Fifteen seconds until the surface.

“Thirty minutes, fuckwads,” Salib shouted. “Any dicking around and I’ll shoot every damn one of you myself.”

I’d like to say it was an empty threat for the sake of the fleet’s image, but that’s not really accurate and I’m aiming for full disclosure. The ugly truth is that officers kill their subordinates with alarming regularity during deep space missions if it helps them prove a point, and the soldiers are more than willing to keep their mouths shut about it so long as it isn’t their corpse on the other end of the rifle. Shit happens in deep space. Tensions rise. Small mistakes can cost an entire crew their lives. There’s little tolerance for fuckery of any sort, and especially little during a critical ground mission on an uncharted planet. In those situations, God only knows what fresh hell awaits once the airlock doors open.

“Five seconds. Helmets on. Weapons armed. Feet moving.”

I was about to find out.

GROUND

When the airlock hissed open and hot dust exploded into our line of troopers, my first instinct was to reach for the ghost of the SX rifle I’d carried during my infantry days and take cover until I spotted an enemy target through the cloud. In the confusion, even Salib’s troops—fresh on the heels of their Sergeant’s death-threats toward anyone who lost control during the mission—ducked reflexively and sought shelter against the airlock walls.

Damn
, I thought. It was going to be an uphill battle getting to the surface, even though the ramp was on a downward slope. The wind tore through us so violently that it was difficult to keep my footing even with the gravity-equalizing boots holding fast to the steel.

Those first few moments were chaos. In retrospect, we weren’t even
close
to prepared for the surface conditions. But in our defense, we went in blind. It’s easy to get rattled that way, even for combat vets. The success of a mission, Gibbons used to say, is predicated on the preparedness of the soldiers. Knowing the enemy. The weather. Where to look and what to look for. We had no idea what we were getting into.

The debris that pinged loudly against our spacesuits was unsettling on its own, but what really put everyone on edge was the grating, persistent screech riding on the wind. It was so loud that I couldn’t hear Salib’s voice over the comm link even though I saw her lips moving. I tried to cover my ears, forgetting my helmet was locked and also that I was carrying a charge-pistol in my right hand. Others, maybe soldiers with more sensitive eardrums than my own or maybe ones who’d just left the volume too high on their comms and had to deal with the amplification, fell straight away, dropped their weapons, and started screaming. As with Salib, I couldn’t actually
hear
their screams, but I
saw
them well enough.

Salib stomped back up the ramp and grabbed one of the soldiers by the forearm. She was livid. Her squad looked weak and she wouldn’t stand for it, even if it was understandable given the circumstances. I couldn’t tell who she’d singled out at the time because his back was to me, but I discovered later that it was Ensign Tomas Chara. For the sake of this report, it should be noted that he was the first field casualty on Furnace, although I’m not sure what the official designation is for a soldier who kills
himself
before the bullets start to fly.

Poor bastard.

Salib shook him a few times, kicked him in the stomach plating, and then tapped his helmet with the barrel of her SX-60, trying to get his attention. It didn’t do much good. He just kept writhing around the airlock ramp, clutching the sides of his helmet like he was trying to dig to his eardrums.

I’m not sure what pushed him over the edge. No one else is, either. It happened too suddenly.

We all watched in horror as Chara rolled onto his stomach and convulsed until his momentum and the shuddering contortions of his body worked him into the fetal position. At first, I didn’t consider it much more than an overreaction or hypersensitivity to external stimuli, which is common on an unknown planet. Maybe the strain of space travel had been too much for him and this was just a manifestation of deeper problems. God knows it’s happened enough in the fleet to justify the notion. But then, he started clawing at his helmet so violently that at least two of his fingers snapped inside his gloves, and that’s when I knew it was something worse than minor agitation. He’d crossed the border into full-blown psychosis.

I stumbled in his direction, probably shouting, “Shit!” or something equally eloquent, but the comm log is either lost or indecipherable so I guess there’s nothing to corroborate that particular detail. Matter of fact, we don’t have anything to prove the incident itself other than anecdotal evidence. Our sensors were offline, so no one has been able to verify whether or not Chara suffered any fractures before he pulled the plug, but I guess it doesn’t matter to anyone but me. Knowing would help me make some sense of it, I suppose. Sometimes, though, we just aren’t given that luxury.

“Tom!” I
know
I shouted that out loud, because I remember thinking how strange it was that I’d never used his first name until that moment, and I still couldn’t get it right. Like Teemo, Chara was proud of his heritage. Under other circumstances, he would have kicked my ass if he’d heard me call him anything other than Ensign Chara or Tomas.

Salib was busy cussing him out when the first trickle of blood fell from his earlobes, and she still hadn’t finished by the time he pressed the retrieval button on his helmet and the glass dome slid back into his suit. After that, she shut up completely—a rare feat for Salib when her troops were performing below her expectations—and the entire squad, even the ones who’d been doubled-over in agony, scrambled to reverse Chara’s fatal mistake before it was too late.

But it wasn’t a mistake, and we
were
too late. And, lacking sensors, we didn’t understand the composition of the atmosphere at that point so we didn’t know to stay away from him until it was too late to avoid another unpleasant surprise. In many ways, it was the worst part of all.

Within moments of lowering his helmet, Chara’s head exploded, showering the entire squad with blood, bone, and brain-matter from head to toe. Even with my helmet firmly locked over my face and my body covered in Kevlar and metal alloys, I flinched when the splash hit. I don’t know if it was revulsion so much as utter shock, but I had trouble opening my eyes again for a few moments. I didn’t want to see the aftermath, and I still hadn’t fully grasped the gravity of the situation.

I was frozen, ruminating on how we’d been obliviously coasting through neutral space only an hour earlier, our minds occupied by anything and everything other than the possibility of watching a fellow soldier’s head explode on a scorching, desolate planetoid in the middle of nowhere.

It was sobering. It was surreal. It had me on the verge of utter hysteria, and it didn’t take much imagination to realize I wasn’t alone in that regard.

I might never have moved from my crouch at the foot of the ramp if Salib hadn’t punched me straight in the chest. Even in a full suit, the impact jarred me out of combat shock. With the infantry’s electrical arm-bolt charges and the sergeant’s considerable strength, she packed a hell of a punch.

My eyelids snapped open immediately. Salib stood less than a foot away, motioning frantically toward the dust-veiled, dull-orange tundra. Evidently she’d realized that she couldn’t out-voice the screeching wind, but also knew she needed to get us moving to shake the paralyzing effects of Chara’s death. And it
was
a paralyzing event for us, especially on the heels of watching Marty’s wife die in the stasis chamber. I can personally attest to that.

No matter how hardened you become against death at sea and in the trenches, exploding heads and spousal farewells always melt your heart and your composure. If they don’t, you don’t have any business serving in the fleet in the first place, because you’ve clearly lost sight of why we do what we do. I know how
ra-ra
that sounds, and I certainly have my own issues with the fleet, but a cold heart goes well beyond regulations and combat training. It’s an issue of humanity, and it’s easy to lose it among aliens even without brushing it aside yourself.

Anyway, Salib avoided a major catastrophe by getting us all focused again, even if it was only a temporary fix. I calmly engaged the sight filters on my glass helmet and ran through my noise-cancelling sub-programs until I found one at the right frequency. After that, I could think a little. Not to maximum capacity, but enough to effectively remove my head from my ass.

There were still a couple soldiers on their knees along the ramp or on the ground scrambling to calibrate the systems in their suits, but nine other squad members had regained their nerve and were taking defensive positions around the ship. We had to move quickly. There was a lot to do still and the squad hadn’t requested assistance from engineering with the mechanical work, which struck me as odd. Maybe because half the engineering crew had perished in the crash.

I figured Salib was supposed to perform the evaluation herself, in that case. She was the only member of her team even remotely qualified to diagnose ship malfunctions from the outside, after all. But since the captain had sent me along for the ride and Rosie (better known as Lieutenant Iglesias, our engineer) was nowhere to be found, I grabbed the repair kit from the extended airlock ramp and hustled to the surface.

Damn
, I realized halfway down.
It’s my fault.
I
was supposed to get Rosie from engineering before we pressurized.

I’d fucked up again. Salib should have known that and reminded me, of course, but that doesn’t vindicate me. Having comm systems damaged ship-wide certainly contributed to my negligence though, and that’s not an excuse so much as a frustrating fact. If the comms had been operational when I’d exited the bridge, I could have called down to engineering and Rosie would have known to meet us at the airlock. But my head had been a mess then and I’d forgotten once I reached the lower decks.

The death of Marty’s wife shook me, which I guess makes me a good little human. Looking back, it’s amazing I even remembered to initialize the oxygen and gravity equalizers on my suit before exiting the
Rockne
in that mental state
.
As far as this particular mission goes, though, forgetting to fetch Iglesias was a relatively minor offense. It’s low on the totem-pole even among my personal indiscretions. Besides, I’m sure Rosie had her hands full in engineering, though I never thought to ask her. It’s a reasonable assumption, I’d say. There was more than enough damage on the inside to keep her busy.

With the dust swirling around me, I never got a good look at the lay of the land during that disastrous recon and repair. By the time I reached the bottom of the ramp and worked my way behind the line of soldiers to the exhaust ports for the FTL drive, my adrenaline was pumping so furiously I could barely grip the emergency repair kit, and that wasn’t like me at all. Like I’ve said, I saw plenty of crazy shit during my infantry days. I stared down the white eyes of death more times than you could ever imagine during the Kalak War. I bagged thirty-seven lizards in the Battle for Titan and was held captive by Tsoul terrorists for six weeks orbiting Mars before I grifted one of their spacesuits and hopped out an airlock (no thanks to the indifferent Crown for that escapade, who refused to negotiate with ‘terrorists’ while I was left to foot the bill for their principles).

I’m not mentioning these things because I want you to marvel at my galactic conquests or sterling fleet career. I’m just trying to paint you a picture that I was no first-term recruit with cabbage behind the ears. For me to quake with adrenaline when there were no enemies in the immediate vicinity and with no less than twelve trained fleet soldiers watching my back, it was clear something wasn’t right. It does make a certain kind of sense, though. I’m a navigator, and navigators as a rule don’t like to lose their bearings, especially when there isn’t a star visible and yet the ground beneath our feet is burning hot. On top of that, for all the missions I’d run out in neutral space, I hadn’t arrived on an uncharted planet until that day. The possibilities were terrifying. Exciting too, I guess, but mostly terrifying.

I could have been fine, though. I could have held it together in spite of my overwhelming paranoia and sense of displacement. In fact, I even managed to set the scan and repair kit down on the warm, dusty rocks and unbuckle three of the four clasps before I felt a presence behind me and my fingers locked up.

“What …” I gasped.

I guess I was a little jumpy. With good reason, as it turned out.

I turned slowly, alarmed but attempting to save face in case it was just a soldier taking position to shield me from the wind and the theoretical hostile natives. Part of me is still sure that’s what it was, because that’s the trust they drill into you during training. You’d think it would be the other way around to keep us on our toes, but there have been far too many missions on peculiar planets where soldiers get a little too excited and shoot to kill. That’s why they discourage trigger-happy behavior in Basic. The death toll on excursions to uncharted planets is about ninety percent friendly fire. Usually, if there are potential hostiles on the surface, we know well in advance of landing.

I kept my head about me as well as I could, but when I looked over my shoulder, there was no one around. Not any more, anyway. I did spot
something, though. It was there one moment and gone the next, but it chilled me ten times more than watching the death of Marty’s wife and seeing Chara’s head explode combined.

It was my mother’s severed head, rolling across the dull-orange earth like a macabre tumbleweed.

“Jesus Christ…”

My stomach rose into my lungs. I fell against the side of the ship and stared at it with wide-eyed horror.

And then, it was gone. I was left trembling beneath a smashed FTL drive with blue smoke billowing from the starboard exhaust vents.

“All right, Sergeant,” I said into my (finally) functioning comm link, deciding then and there that I’d had enough. “Scanner’s broken,” I lied. “There’s nothing we can do from the outside until we get it running again.” My voice was surprisingly level. Thank God for small favors. I couldn’t think of anything more traumatizing than recounting my experiences between the stasis chamber and the severed head in detail. Even then, I knew it would cause my mind to fracture. “I’m heading back.”