From the Hands of Hostile Gods – Ch. 30

<– Chapter 29

Where there should have been nothing, there was pain.

There came a sensation like panic, then despair. A sense of flight aborted and the wailing of the mothers of stillborn. He made a noise that brought to mind the word skittering, as though he possessed too many legs, as though he was a spider. Except the sound didn’t come from outside of him, but inside.

The pain showed itself to him. Not his head. He thought he might be hungover, though he didn’t remember drinking. It was his back. His goddamned spine ached. Felt like he’d slept on a pair of scissors.

He wasn’t supposed to be sleeping at all. He didn’t remember sleeping. The afternoon was too full for anything like a nap. He’d promised Ashburn they would run over the disaster protocols. He had to log his weekly contact with mission comm HQ. After he got off the round, he still had to meet Djen for the shift reports and tomorrow’s duty roster. And maybe coffee later, after the business was done.

His heart shuddered in his chest just thinking about it. He was such an idiot.

Brett opened his eyes. He looked up at the pale brightness of the ceiling that wasn’t his private quarters. He frowned, then remembered. He cursed.

“Doc, I think I just fucked up my image. I fell asleep. I didn’t realize I was so tired. Is that going to be a problem?” He sat up grinning. “Please don’t tell me we’re going to have to do it again.”

But Liston wasn’t there. No one was there. The med bay was empty.

“Doc?”

From the Hands of Hostile Gods – Ch. 29

<–Chapter 28 / Chapter 30 –>

He waited.

Through the rumble of the Escape Module engaging its engines, through the heady and violent roar of its launch up through the retractable dome, through the ensuing silences and emptiness of a station abandoned of all human life but his own, Brett waited. He tore the legs off his flimsy table and slabbed it against Cassandra’s front panels, then he sat on it with his back against her warmth and his head beside the shattered capsule. When he looked up, he could see Emily.

When he looked down, he could see the cards as he had dealt them, spread out between his legs. He couldn’t remember the spread as Ritter had shown him, nor the meaning of any of the cards themselves. He hadn’t found Ritter’s portable computer with the database of meanings and didn’t feel like searching for it. He couldn’t even say why he had retrieved the cards in the first place. It had been something he had done, an unconsidered item on his list of errands.

He realized vaguely that this was probably a bad sign, some sort of negative indicator of the organisms’ control over him. But he couldn’t parse the significance of it, so he left it alone. Instead, he dealt the cards because it was something to do while he waited.

He liked the feel of them in his hands, their slick and sturdy weight, the mechanical process of shuffle and deal and cogitation. This was a thing he had discovered. What the cards meant—what people said they meant—was insignificant to him. He had made his choices and not just divined, but forged his future. There was nothing prophetic they could tell him that was of any value or that wasn’t already known.

But as he looked at them, studied their pictures, their backgrounds, the warm and solid pictures they bore, he built a narrative. The cards whispered stories constructed of image and thought and loosely tethered correlations. They told a story that was unique each time he laid them down, and though it was not his story, it was a human one. It was populated by lives and destinies that were glorious, by people with long and complex histories that intertwined with his by the sheer and simple fact of their human community. They were not real, but he understood them.

He surveyed the cards before him, most of them Cups. The colors were green and blue, sky and sea, shore and foam. The man in the first card stood on the sand and peered off into the wide and empty horizon, searching for ships that did not come, or ships that had gone. Brett understood him. A man bound to the land by history and training, a man terrified of the vast deep that stretched beyond him. But a man who loved it as well, who heard the crash of the waves and experienced both terror and desire.

The unknown man was in the next card as well, and all the ones that followed. A man desperate to find his way, to achieve some victory over the terror, some grasp on the thing he desired most, never realizing that the two were not distinguishable. It was not an either/or proposition. There was no desire without terror, and no terror without the thing he most wanted. They were the same.

He skipped ahead to the end to see if he ever discovered the truth. Did he claim his desire only to find, once he had it, that there was no pleasure in owning it? That the pleasure was all in the pursuit of it? Did he become disillusioned by knowledge, or paralyzed by fear so that wisdom was never gained? Was there wisdom in victory, or was the wisdom in the sacrifices made?

From the Hands of Hostile Gods – Ch. 28

<– Chapter 27 / Chapter 29 –>

“Brett.”

He snapped forward, lost his balance. At some point, his legs had fallen asleep. His sudden movement jerked them to the side. They thumped against the floor like wooden blocks, and only their numb weight kept him from toppling over backward.

He sucked in a breath, blinked at his surroundings. Oriented.

He’d fallen asleep. He’d been dreaming, dreaming about Emily. That was what he told himself.

“Brett.”

The voice was more insistent this time. Ilam’s voice, from the intercom in the wall behind him. The tinny speaker made him sound harsh, or maybe it was just impatience. He didn’t know how long Ilam had been calling, though if it was very long, he could imagine what he was thinking. He was probably making certain the gun was still loaded. Brett tried to hurry, but the pins and needles had started, and all he could manage was a crab-like hobble.

Brett stabbed the button.

“I’m here.”

“About bloody time.”

Interlude: FYI

Just thought you’d want to know.

From the Hands of Hostile Gods – Ch. 27

<– Chapter 26 / Chapter 28 –>

It would have to be done very carefully, this last step. Brett knew this. In his office, on a shelf where it was readily available, he had a book that ran to better than a thousand pages of schematics, diagrams, logical arguments, all aimed at not only showing him how to do this unthinkable thing, but why it had to be done in this precise order without any omissions. The major point which the writers of the book were trying to impress upon him and anyone else authorized to read it was simply that the things the book had to say should never be put into practice. Never.

Except station commanders were trained to contend with all the various and sundry catastrophes that could override that never condition. That had been part of his training for this job. He’d had to memorize more or less the entire contents of the manual. He had to be able to perform the unthinkable without hesitation or error should the need arise.

Brett had no doubt that ‘need’ was the correct word. He’d never required anything as deeply or strongly in his entire life.

He stood in the familiar darkness, shivered at the chill he knew from so much experience. Varicolored lights danced and flickered along Cassandra’s smooth, matte skin. She knew he was present. She’d forced him to log himself into the system as soon as he entered the door.

Cassandra could do many things. She could analyze binary-converted sensory data. She could tabulate infinite series of calculations without tedium. She could identify the crew by brain wave or heartbeat or voice recognition. She had possibly developed the capacity of limited consciousness.

From the Hands of Hostile Gods – Ch. 26

<– Chapter 25 / Chapter 27 –>

If he really wanted to think about it, Brett could have chosen to blame Liston for what he planned to do. Liston had given him the idea. Liston had pointed him in the right direction. Yesterday, he had said the organism largely eschews the left portion of the brain. Instead, it draws its harvest from the right hemisphere and the pre-frontal cortex specifically. . .The pre-frontal cortex of the right hemisphere stores our autobiographical memories, our mechanisms for accessing emotions, and current theory suggests, our concept of self-definition. It makes us who we are.

But Brett had let it roll past him then, unheeded because it didn’t seem to have any value except as a way to understand the mechanism of the organism. He had gained wisdom during the night, this morning finally seen the possibilities, and now his heart thrummed in his chest. It was a feeling that reminded him of hope, though he couldn’t say for certain that was in fact what he felt. It had been too long since he’d felt it to remember.

Brett stood in the bio lab on sublevel four, inside the biological hazard containment bubble where Djen and Micah had pored over the organism’s secrets, dissecting its micobacterial menace. He was not wearing an e-suit as the large and red-lettered signs instructed. He hadn’t waited for the negative pressure atmospheric systems to cycle before opening the second, secure set of doors. He only briefly paused for the dissipation of the emergency antibacterial vapor which automatically released from the chemical vents because he hadn’t followed proper protocols, and that only because the mist had a tendency to be corrosive. He didn’t even close the two sets of sliding doors behind him to activate the filtration vents. The biohazard bubble had endlessly redundant precautionary systems. For Brett, the entire idea of precautions seemed somewhat ludicrous in hindsight.

On the pale counter surface in front of him sat an array of diagnostic equipment, a pair of Hamer microscopes with wide knobs for easier use by gloved hands. At the end of the counter was the high, stainless steel tube of the scanning electron microscope’s vacuum chamber. The SEM’s monitor was on and it displayed a false color image of the organism at extreme magnification. Brett looked at it only long enough to recognize it as one of the pictures Micah had shown them two nights ago.

The work area was littered with crumbs of dirt from the coring samples they’d taken from the thermal vent. There were swaths that were mostly clean, where it looked like one of them, probably Micah, had swept the surface with a forearm. Brett wasn’t a biologist, but he could recognize that it would have been unacceptable practice under normal circumstances. As it stood, it was just more evidence of the haste with which they’d conducted the investigations. It was a wonder they’d had any success at all, and Brett had to consider for not the first time that Ilam’s contributions had more to do with it than he was admitting.

From the Hands of Hostile Gods – Ch. 25

<– Chapter 24 / Chapter 26 –>

Brett just made it to the obs deck before Ilam caught up with him. He stood at the porthole window watching the orange glow of the sunset on the red sands. The weather was quiet today, no storms, though he could see the sand dunes rippling beneath the wind. Through rents in the cloud cover, he could see wide swathes of black sky, littered with stars.

Ilam came up behind him and stood at his shoulder, but said nothing. The meteorological panel was lit green, fully functional. The various other screens and status boards for external equipment ranged from blinking amber to glaring red. The report monitors for the assorted Sperling Engines spilled a constant terminal error message.

Finally, Ilam said, “I thought you might want some company.”

“There you go making the same old mistake.”

“I promised Liston I would make a final attempt to talk some reason into you.” He hesitated for the bare space of a second. “That’s the extent of my lecture. You’ll be sure to tell him I kept my promise.”

Brett appreciated the gesture, but had no way to show it. Anything he said would lead irrevocably to explanations he didn’t feel prepared to offer.

“Do you want to at least tell me why you’re refusing the therapy?”

“No.”

From the Hands of Hostile Gods – Ch. 24

<– Chapter 23 / Chapter 25 –>

They started with the beds first, selecting the dead Liston identified and transferring the bodies from the med bay to second level storage. Of the twelve that had been, seven remained. The recovery of the sick would take longer, at least in theory, and Liston determined they could be safely moved to the rec area where the others had slept the night before. Pallets were transferred, followed by the bodies to occupy them and portable monitoring devices patched up to the main med bay console. Then the beds were stripped and new linens retrieved and the room returned to some semblance of sanitary order.

By then it was afternoon. Ashburn and Whitney prepared a light lunch of sandwiches and fruit in the commissary, which everyone ate, but no one with anything like zeal. Vernon informed them that as a potential last meal, it more or less sucked, but he was grateful for the effort all the same. Some of them laughed, but only with the same enthusiasm with which they had eaten.

When they returned to the med bay, Liston awaited them. The vials had been loaded into injector guns, and the guns themselves placed beside single syringes on small trays which extended above the beds. The blankets had been turned down and the lights muted except for brilliant pools projected into the spaces where Liston would stand while administering the therapy. And there was music, serene and pleasant, the volume so low it could hardly be heard. But Brett detected woodwinds and gentle drums. He couldn’t have named the composer.

The doctor stood in the middle of the room, a few paces to the right of the rows of beds. His hands were pressed together in front of his chest, and he smiled.

“Now comes the difficult part,” he said. “We’ve made all the arrangements. There aren’t any more distractions to keep us from the matter at hand. Someone must find the courage to go first, and it isn’t an enviable position, I know.”

He bent his head toward Brett. “And it can’t be you, Commander. You would lead by example, given the opportunity, but that won’t work. If this procedure is to have the stamp of legitimacy, you have to go last, after everyone except Ilam and myself.”

From the Hands of Hostile Gods – Ch. 23

<– Chapter 22 / Chapter 24 –>

The last survivors of Persia Station–for all Brett knew, the last survivors of Archae Stoddard–gathered in the med bay. They formed a rough circle, standing with their backs to the sick, their shoulders almost touching. In addition to those he had expected, there was Garaby, the system hardware analyst. Reece and Whitney, though he couldn’t say at the moment remembered exactly what either of them did. But they were new faces, people from outside the circle he had come to recognize, and Brett smiled at them as a greeting.

He had let them all sleep in, and most had taken him up on the offer. Djen had awakened only after he returned to his quarters, changed into fresh clothes, then touched her face. He’d made coffee for the rest and roused them as gently as possible. Brett couldn’t explain this generosity to himself, but when he looked at them–Ashburn’s hard wariness, Vernon’s frenetic energy, Attler’s cool but bruised vulnerability–he was pleased. They’d suffered enough personal cataclysms.

It was a few minutes shy of noon, station time. Liston and Ilam sat on their stools against the microscopy counter and grinned idiotically at him because they had made the deadline. Both clutched large mugs of steaming coffee. Their eyes were sunken, their cheeks drawn. They looked gray with fatigue, but triumphant. Lined on the counter between them were nearly a dozen vials of clear liquid, each one labeled. Brett. Riley. Ashburn. Liston.

Brett waited until he had their attention. It wasn’t long. No one was in the mood to speak. Even Djen’s occasional hand on his elbow seemed inappropriately social to him considering the circumstances. Brett cleared his throat.

“Explain the procedure, Doctor.”

Interlude: Dogs – Upside Down

There really isn’t anything more to say.

http://upsidedowndogs.com