Aurona, page 12
As the first arm of open fronds neared completion, the wind spiral was already sending a gale whipping across the center. He squinted. What was this? On the other side, the bumpy tops of coiled fronds were being uncovered! “Hey, I can really move now! No more digging!” He tossed the shovel, sprinting to the other side. Scurrying along on all fours, he started resolutely on the second arm. These fronds were far easier to resurrect, their tightly coiled knobs were well above the surface and scoured clean by the wind. With his back to a rising gale, he followed his virtual, curving paths and finished the remaining arms of his pattern. He backed away. The blast was intense and the inner fronds were getting shredded, but the wind spiral was holding its own!
It was working! With nowhere to go but up, the crystals rose in a dense, violently twisting column and were carried away. In seconds, the sharp edge of his starship was exposed. The hull gleamed brightly in the intense sunlight, undamaged!
He leaped exuberantly, his fists in the air. “My ship! My ship!”
Suddenly, the ground started to slump. He scuttled backward, frantically kicking himself away from the edge of his widening crater. His groping hands quickly found a section of exposed webbing and he held on for all he was worth, watching the swift process in amazement. “Wow! This is flat incredible! Far better than I could have hoped for!”
Autogyros running, the saucer was standing on edge, squarely in the center of a great, wind-blasted bowl of crystals. Shredded and tattered, the fronds were hanging limply over the rim and the howl of the wind was subsiding. Shaking his head, he took a deep breath. “I only hope to God that this beautiful bucket of bolts still works.”
Phrasing carefully, he spoke a precise series of codes. Deep in the core of the starship, the great antigrav machinery responded. It rose majestically, leaving a clean, knife-edged groove in the bottom of the crater. Holding tightly to a trunk, he leaned out precariously over the rim. Way down in the bottom, relentlessly trickling in through the crystal strata, he caught a glimpse of liquid. His eyebrows rose. “Water?” He blinked in surprise as the proportional bars on his elemental analyzer spelled it out for him. “Yes, it’s definitely a chloride of sodium. There might have been a huge sea here at one time!” At a sudden rumbling sound, he quickly cleared his face shield and looked up.
The far wall was collapsing! The obelisk was breaking through!
It fed noisily, shaking the ground with subterranean rumbles of satisfaction. As the tautly stretched webs snapped with loud twangs, he could see a mammoth tongue of greedy, grayish obelisk flesh licking up the ruptured taproots. Suddenly, his body shook in the blast of a deep, subsonic bellow. The saw-toothed edge picked up speed, singing a new note!
“Oh, no,” he gasped, “He’s closing in!” The wind off the spinning trumpet shell was starting to buffet the hull of the starship as if it were a paper cutout suspended on a string. He sprinted around the rim of the crater toward the obelisk. The spinning, saw-toothed edge appeared to be clogged, wet and shiny with the ruptured shreds of fronds. He looked up, checking. The open hatch of the starship was way at the top, too far to jump. Dialing up his antigrav belt to max, he leaped fearlessly, jumping nearly thirty feet through the air to land squarely on the obelisk’s moving ridges. Checking over his head again, he sped up the starship’s outer gyro. As the moving ridges carried his small body toward the point of contact, he commanded his e-helmet to take over and fine-tune the ship’s rotation. They drew nearer, the autoprogram timing and synchronizing the two paths. “Closer, closer….” As the open hatch swung down, he watched it flop open, pouring out crystals! He dug in his heels and tensed. “Now!”
Like a tiny mote between two behemoths, he flung his body through the air and dove headfirst into the hatch just as the saw-toothed points clacked loudly against the ship. He had to duck great shards of broken shell tumbling through the open hatch behind him. Operating on pure adrenaline, he grabbed the ladder inside the airlock and held on tightly, pulling down menus and tapping madly with his chin. In command of his ship once more, he rotated it up into a horizontal plane. As the floor tipped, the crystals and pieces of shell fell to the floor of the airlock in a torrent. Breathing a prayer, he reached out and closed the hatch with his free hand. It locked with a loud click. The artificial gravity light came on, blinking softly.
“Bingo!” he whooped. “I’m in!” Quickly decontaminating both himself and the airlock, he opened the inside door, then flinging off his backpack and gloves, he slammed it shut behind him and sprinted through the corridors to the command center.
Breathing hard, he dove into his chair, yanked off his helmet, and strapped in. “Okay baby, do your stuff!” Locking in a rapid climb, he punched the appropriate buttons and waited for a response…. Nothing happened!
“Huh? What’s the matter?” he shouted in frustration, clenching his fists. “This can’t be happening! This planet’s a nightmare!” Although his body was exhausted, his mind flew into overdrive, trained by years of schooling in ‘what if’ scenarios. He calmed himself down, fighting hard to remain objective.
“So what if the creature is intelligent,” he panted, “and it doesn’t want me to leave? What if this big Obelisk, or all of them for that matter, figured out a way to jam the ship’s controls? Hey! That might be why we crashed into this stinking planet in the first place! Anything’s possible!” He reached down to retrieve his e-helmet. “Well, I know this thing worked a few minutes ago.” As he yanked it down over his head, he could see a brilliant flash on the helmet’s screen.
Jagged, angry bolts of LIGHTNING were lighting up a wide panorama! He blinked his eyes in shock. They were coming from somewhere inside the obelisk!
He cleared his face shield and shouted, half-crazed, at the ship’s flashing holographic views in front of him. “Electricity? Of course! That’s it! You generate electricity! You’ve got huge, built-up static charges from moving around in the crystals!” He wasted no more time. Switching the ship’s flight controls entirely to his e-helmet, he pulled down the appropriate menus and punched out a rapid climb.
Like a slave suddenly freed from its master, the ship took flight and rose high above the crater. As the spiral openings appeared in front of him, a sudden tornado blast began to pull the starship relentlessly toward the obelisk like a great vacuum! What was this? The intelligent creature had already figured out that there was a new source of commands, and he couldn’t pull away! He worked the helmet’s controls frantically, gripping the arms of his chair. “So you’re not done yet, huh?” He set his jaw. “You think you’ve outsmarted me, huh? Well, if you want me, you got me! I’m not resisting anymore, so try this on for size!” Simultaneously he threw up the shields, banked the starship sharply onto its edge, and blasted toward the vertical openings at full thrust.
“Into the fire!!” he screamed.
A great storm of electrical charge greeted the ship as it disappeared into a cloud of crystals, there was a loud, cracking noise, then an explosion of shattered, flying shell. As ship climbed over the ragged top, there was a loud wail and the electrical resistance immediately stopped.
His primal instincts were now on full alert. Instinctively, he threw on the cloaking device and hid inside the obelisk’s dense column of crystals, following it toward the horizon. His ship had become an invisible, invincible quarry. He looked back one last time, shaking his head in wonder.
The entire planet was lighting up in a dazzling spectacle! Helplessly consumed with rage, all the wind obelisks were blazing to life, thundering and bellowing in anger! He grimaced. So this had been a collective effort! Now, each suspecting the others of stealing the prize, they were sending great, arcing bolts through the air! He gaped at the screen, enthralled.
Like a spiny sea urchin being zapped in a shimmering aurora, the spiky ball of a planet writhed in agony. Smaller spires weaved and toppled, cleaved in two by the old giant’s massive bolts.
“So they tricked us,” he growled. “This planet was positioned directly in our path, right at some interstellar crossroads! When we slowed down to change direction, they scrambled our controls and made us crash! Well, I’m sure they didn’t count on my new Bitron e-helmet.” He held it up, admiring it, and then pushed away from the counter, shaking with exhaustion and relief. “Enough, already!” he breathed. “I’ve had it with this place!”
A green light blinked to life. He looked down to see the main controls engaging: autosequence had resumed! “Well, whaddaya know! We’re out of range!” As he stared at the steady green light, the shaking in his gut subsided.
Totally exhausted, he threw up his hands in resignation, threw his hemet aside, and staggered back through the corridors to the pod room. The cool salve felt delicious on his hot skin as he stumbled through the prep routine. “Just a few more minutes,” he whispered groggily. “Just a few more….” He swallowed hard: the throat insert made him gag. “I’m almost there….” He closed his eyes, the pleasant gas seeping in.
The tunnel beckoned. A deep sigh of victory escaped from his lips as he loosened his grip. Finally! On to the goal! Good riddance and sweet dreams.
Chapter 7: JOURNEY
Blackness…. Dead, cold blackness. The saucer’s great, dark silhouette hurtled through space like a fleeting shadow, its silent rows of pupalike pods nourishing their fragile life forms within. After seven impossibly long centuries, a chronometer in the starship’s mainframe sounded with a small, final click.
The crew’s frozen bodies had depended on mechanical devices to keep them on the threshold of life for an unthinkably long time. Now at the end of their sleep, a battery of far-infrared heaters began to glow inside their contour tables. As the temperature rose, thousands of nano pumps awoke in a carefully timed sequence, nudging and coaxing their blood to trickle through elaborate, fluidic switching devices. Inside the great battery of capillarylike tubes, their sluggish hemoglobin cells lined up in single file to be oxygenated. As micro doses of adrenalin were injected into their arteries and small electronic surges stimulated their hearts to beat, their blood pressure rose in response to balloon their newly flexible arteries.
Somewhere out there, somewhere at that fleeting time and place on reality’s nebulous fringe, it was Adam’s turn. He felt a tiny prick on his skin and turned slowly, drifting with sudden purpose through his vast, dark emptiness. There was a faint suggestion of light in the distance and then a quickening, tortuous pull. Frightened, he resisted with all his might, but felt his comforting veil of darkness relentlessly slipping away behind him. Gathering momentum, his body began to careen recklessly toward an odd, bright, translucent membrane, that frightening, uncertain threshold where the past and future merge into the elusive moment of ‘now.’
He broke through in a rush of awareness, a newborn once again, a helpless child forced from his fabulous, fetal limbo. As an electronic jolt awakened his heart to beat and his diaphragm to breathe, his sleep pod opened like an unfolding flower.
There was a sound of voices. Yes, faint voices were out there somewhere, coming from far, far away. Many people were murmuring in the distance, sounding concerned. Suddenly a mask was slipped over his face and moist, fresh air poured into his cold lungs. He summoned all his will and forced his eyes to open a slit. Amorphous shapes floated around him in a thick fog, then slowly resolved into focus. As the distant voices spoke again, this time they were a lot clearer. He understood.
“What in blazes happened to you, sir?” someone spoke out of his range of vision. “You look awf….” There was a sharp nudge to the man’s ribs from his companion and a deeper voice interrupted.
“Ah, not awful, just a bit, um, older. Not much.”
Adam jerked as a needle pricked his skin. “M-m-m-mph!”
“Sorry, sir. Just hair and nail growth activator. The manual says on page twelve to give you this shot when you wake up. Gotta start those cells dividing again!”
“Um-hmm,” he agreed, with a slight nod. His vocabulary was improving.
A female voice intervened, sounding motherly. “Everyone, please! Give him a minute or two!”
“Sorry, sir. Ah, the manual said we got microdoses of some kind of growth retardant serum while we slept! It makes sense, doesn’t it? If we hadn’t gotten them, our masks wouldn’t fit tightly to our faces. We’d all have seven year old beards….”
“Hey!” the female voice interrupted. “Not all of us!” As she rubbed her chin in mock horror, the room echoed with laughter. “On the other hand, so to speak….” She held up her fingers, studying them. “I wouldn’t mind the nails a bit!”
There was more laughter and then the sound of rapid footsteps. Another voice filled the room, sounding out of breath. “Th-there’s a lot of strange debris in the hallways, guys,” he wheezed. “I traced it back to an airlock!”
Adam stretched his aching arms. There was a strange, deep chill in his bones. Was this what it was like to be twenty-eight? His swollen eyes swept the Pod Room and came to rest on the man’s startled face.
“Oh, ah … hi, sir,” the man coughed nervously, “I-I wasn’t aware you were back with us yet. Sorry!”
Adam nodded, letting his questioning gaze fall to the man’s hands.
“Oh, yeah! Look!” He awkwardly stuck out his hand. “This is the strangest stuff. These powdery crystals were sticking to everything in the airlock!”
Crystals? Adam squinted at them falling in clumps and floating eerily in the bright lights. As he opened his mouth to speak there was a rough, sliding movement against his tender, wet skin. He looked down, momentarily distracted. The towel they’d draped over his naked body had slipped to the floor. Someone snatched it and threw it back over him. Suddenly embarrassed, a vein pounded in his neck. After a long pause, he tried to talk, readjusting the shape of his tongue and mouth to unfamiliar speech. “Re… mem … ber…,” he croaked.
As they waited expectantly, he studied their faces. Funny they all looked the same, yet somehow different. Older versions of themselves? He finally rasped it out, this time a lot more coherently. “R-remember the rules of quarantine!”
Quarantine? Why quarantine? As they stared blankly at each other, someone produced a jar and the now-suspect crystals were unceremoniously dumped into it. Chagrined , the man who’d found them slipped away to disinfect.
Another man bent toward him, pointing. “Ah, sir? What’s that thing in your hair?” He leaned closer to study the object. As Adam reached up, he felt something spiky, almost metallic. The man pulled out a pair of nippers from his tool bag and commenced to awkwardly poke and cut at it.
“Gloves!” Adam rasped, suddenly alarmed. “And-and get a toxicity reading!”
“Right again, sir! Sorry!”
A flurry of white gloves seemed to float through the air like January snow, blanketing all the upraised hands. The man yanked out the object in a flash, then gingerly holding it up with just the tips of his nippers, he turned on his hand-held toxicity meter. As the gadget beeped, the incoming data began to be analyzed.
Adam squinted, trying see the thing with his blurry vision. The man’s white-gloved fingers were absently folding and unfolding the small gray-green object like an accordion. As it swam into focus, an unforgettable image jarred in his memory.
A frond? Could that wiry thing be a piece of the net? Then all that white stuff in the jar must be the crystals! He slumped backward, his mind whirling. The scorching sun! The obelisks! His endless searching for the ship, the terrible wind! A loud beeping snapped him out of his turmoil.
The man held up the net. “Wow! All green, sir! Toxicity readings negative!”
Adam looked relieved, then confused. “Ah, what if those readings had been positive? Some-some kind of killer microbe could’ve invaded the ship … by now…,” his voice trailed off as he wrestled with the gray areas of protocol.
Chastened and chagrined but totally confused, the small group glanced furtively at each other, shrugging.
He winced, feeling the sudden, uncomfortable wall of silence. “Listen, guys, I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “I need to confess how this weird stuff got into our ship in the first place. It-it was all from my bungling.”
“Sir?”
“That’s right,” he affirmed, then paused once more, a slow smile spreading across his face. “But wait! Actually … I didn’t bungle at all, in fact I saved you from certain death! Yes! You have two undeniable items of proof, right in your hands!” He swung his legs to the floor with purpose, tying the towel tightly around his waist.
They stepped back warily, bewildered by his rapidly shifting emotions.
“Those weird items? You want answers? I’ll give you answers!” He scanned the floor, his mind razor-sharp at last. “Where’s my explorer’s pack?” No one answered. “Elke! Sahir! Joelle! All of you! Find it!”
A feeling of relief swept through the crew as he snapped out commands. Their leader was back. They’d been waiting for orders, any orders, direction of any kind, and were jubilant upon receiving them. They leaped into action.
Down in the hold, a faint yellow light was pulsing. Looming behind a pile of crates in Warehouse F, a lone sleep pod sat unmoving and quiet. Although the main power was connected, a small data plug dangled loosely, forgotten in the frantic, last-minute move. Separated from the ship’s mainframe, its internal backup chronometer flashed, searching for commands. In a frozen state, the stowaway slept on.
It was a completely different story in the brightly-lit Pod Room; the same phenomenon of Adam’s rebirth had started to echo behind him on a grand scale. Softly blooming, bank upon bank of sleek cocoons were whirring open with precise timing to expose their naked, wet, and still quite fragile occupants.
