Authors: Wade Andrew Butcher
Chapter 34
Elisa walked third in line behind Nikolaj and Enric. In that section of their journey, the easiest passable route was down by the river. They walked in single file on top of the rocks by the water. The temperature was beyond their zone of comfort and growing hotter. Sweat poured from all their faces and dripped into their eyes as they progressed. The primary sun shined on the tops of their heads from its high vantage point in the middle of the sky.
They came to a short stretch with larger rocks, and each step had to be carefully selected. Their progress slowed. Elisa kept her eyes on Enric’s feet in front of her while trying to duplicate his steps. The sun radiated onto her shoulders, exposed over her tight utility bra. She wore lightweight pants like the others, garments from the old ship reserved for working in the hot sections. She kept up easily as her light and lean body sprung forward with each step, and the strands of her golden hair that were not stuck to the back of her neck bounced with each downward stride. Her days as a genetic engineer were over, and now it was all about survival in the new world, an undertaking she felt equipped to confront as well as anyone.
When they cleared the large rocks, they walked again on the gravel that sloped into the water edge. Elisa lifted her eyes back from the ground to see Enric’s bare back. The clone of a failed experiment, he was regarded by some as an abomination, but they would not speak it for him to hear. Like wings of a flightless bird, small fins about the length of half his arm emanated from the back of his shoulders. Normally folded down, the fins stood erect on his sweaty back in the heat at the middle of the betaday. He was very strong and traveled well despite his unusual physical appearance.
Enric had a habit of talking to himself that nobody understood. He was whistling as they walked and intermittently mumbling phrases that Elisa could not understand. Most regarded him with caution and misunderstanding. Elisa, however, because of her understanding of mental disorders, regarded him with sympathy and curiosity. He was not incompetent. His mannerisms were harmless and did not affect his ability that she could detect, but he was strange and frequently avoided.
Elisa stepped up alongside Enric, hoping his unusual mind was malleable and receptive to new friends. Nikolaj was only three steps in front of them, so she felt safe.
She inquired, “What are you saying, Enric?”
Enric answered matter-of-factly, “I’m just repeating what I hear.”
Elisa did not want to antagonize him with the obvious question about what he was hearing. Whether a product of past ostracism or a genetic defect in his brain, she wandered if his inner thoughts had spun out of control and warped his perception of reality.
“Auditory hallucinations?”
Enric looked at her and smiled. As if able to step outside himself and analyze his mannerisms, he acknowledged, “Yes, maybe.”
Genuinely interested and detecting that the subject was not off limits, Elisa probed further, “So you hear voices? Interesting. What do they say?”
Enric marched forward and orated, raising his voice a little more proudly than before at the invitation from Elisa to learn more. Nikolaj looked back over his shoulder with a frown and forward again but did not slow down.
Enric spoke in poetic fashion while they pressed onward,
“I am the spirit who lives in the darkness, feeding off the souls of men who have lost their way. I permeate the void and sink into the minds of the weak. I feel you getting closer in the mountain pass, and I am energized. There is excitement once again among the dead. The old corridors of the deep space structure that absorbed me has lost its allure, housing no consciousness to corrupt with my curse. I wore the inhabitants down over the years until the ship fell to its demise.”
“That’s enough!” shouted Nikolaj, apparently not appreciating reference to what they might soon witness.
Enric lowered his voice and continued for Elisa to hear, “
I know not my origin. I wait among the dark energy of space without beginning and without end until life comes and goes, and I bend it to my will. I appear in times of trouble to tempt those who will listen. I hear their thoughts and see through their eyes, and I am indistinguishable from their own minds. Given titles intermittently by those I infect who want to find reason for their anguish, I am nameless.”
Then Elisa was sorry she asked. She fell back behind Enric and asked no further questions.
They finally emerged into the valley beyond the mountain range. Indigenous grasses covered the ground and rose to the middle of their bodies as they walked toward Gambler. The plants covered the legs of the travelers with a foreign stink that rubbed onto their trousers. A sticky substance made their legs itch and added to their discomfort.
Gambler loomed in the distance. It was so big that it seemed near enough to touch, but the group walked for several minutes in the valley and felt no closer than when they emerged from the mountains. The ship was fractured in the middle, broken in two with its tips on mountaintops and the body stretching down into the valley in between. They approached an area without grass in the middle of the field.
The tanks in the center of Gambler had ruptured, and the water had flown through the low ground down into the river. The dirt under their feet was still moist from the ocean that had spilled from the enormous reservoir. The foliage was compressed in comparison to what they traversed coming out of the mountains, trampled by what must have been a rapidly moving stream that emerged from the ship after its impact.
They saw human remains of some that had not made it to the lander, washed out into the valley and deposited onto the foreign ground to decay. There were dead fish skeletons as well. Human survivors of the crash were not anticipated, but Elisa wondered if any of the fish washed all the way to the river, in which case they would have transplanted Earth life onto Beta.
They were still a mile away from the wreckage as they stepped over and around some of the rotted corpses amid the foul stench. The mood was somber as they marched through the path littered with the dead of their former colleagues. Some stopped to look feeling compelled to identify the fallen, but the bodies were beyond recognition.
“Should we bury them or something?” Elisa asked.
“There are too many. Leave them be, for now. Maybe someday, we will honor them, but not today,” replied Nikolaj as his step did not slow.
They filed through the trail to Gambler and stood at the threshold of the broken wreckage. The break in the middle of the massive vessel invited them inside as if it was an open gate beckoning entry. The ship towered over all of them as if it was a mountain itself.
One by one, they all entered into the cover of their old home to escape the blazing sunlight. They broke into groups and scattered about the ship, searching for things they thought were needed or people they missed. The groups broke further into pairs until they were all separated. Elisa accompanied Enric but lagged behind him as he trudged through the tunnels of the ship, up the mountain toward what used to be the front end.
It was a steep climb. He broke off to traverse the mountain across a passageway that used to be a ladder for climbing to the ship interior.
“Slow down,” Elisa urged him. He did not answer as he hurried with a puzzling sense of urgency.
He entered a dark and endless maze of rooms situated halfway up the mountain. The warm, stuffy air did not deter him from the exertion. He explored the old familiar chambers as if looking for treasure. Enric brought himself to the place he sought, the place that used to be his headquarters, the armory.
Among other things, he gathered several electron guns and a knife. The conspiracies of malevolence that would be stimulated by distributing weapons among the people circled in Elisa’s thoughts as she refused to help carry any of his bounty.
He acted as if Elisa was not there, answering none of her questions and acknowledging none of her comments. She left him there and retraced their path back toward the bottom of the mountain.
The travellers regrouped deep in the space under the broken ship at ground level. They waited there for cover of night to stifle the heat left behind by the sun, the primary star. Enric was the last to return, and he did not look well. He walked a crooked line as he stumbled toward the group with an unexpected and uninvited bag full of weapons. Dizzy and dehydrated, he collapsed and went to sleep.
Elisa came to his aid. She poured a small amount of water from a canteen onto his lips. She patted his cheek with her hand. He did not wake. Instead, he began to speak in his sleep at a volume level that only she could hear. A schizophrenic conversation ensued, an exchange with an entity that could not be seen or heard by anyone else. Elisa was confused and scared by his words, but she dared to listen and gather his innermost unconscious thoughts.
Enric spoke,
“Nikolaj is disrespectful toward you. The group should be answering to you, not him. His manner of bullying is misplaced. Who does he think he is? He deserves more than a demotion. He deserves a beating. He deserves a permanent injury from that beating. He deserves to be killed. No. Tortured. Tortured with the knowledge that his actions resulted in his pain. He will talk down to you no more. You will strip him and whip his naked body with blades, leaving him bloodied for all to see. He will beg for mercy, and he will not receive it. He will request death at your hands, and you will deny it and let his suffering kill him.
“Wait, what am I thinking?
“You are thinking correctly. You will band with others of a like mind, so that arrogance will be punishable with vigilante justice. These people will not be allowed to look after their own interests to the detriment of common goals, building their own status in a world in which they had no say or influence in creating.
“No. That is not the way. I am a good person.
“You are not perceived that way. They avoid you and talk behind your back. There is no more right or wrong in this place. The reality stands by itself without regard for what is good and what is bad. Those who survive will not trouble themselves with any such dilemma.
“I can change the perception.
“You should not have to. You have done nothing to require any justification of yourself. You did not choose to be placed among this crowd. Your potential should not be held by their oppression.
When he awoke, Elisa was sitting over him feeding him small doses of water. Her golden hair hung down from around her face. Elisa listened but chose only to remember his words and not alert anyone to his delirious comments. At least she would wait until they returned and then approach Nikolaj when Enric was not near.
“Can’t handle the heat, big guy?” Elisa asked.
Enric appeared too impaired to be embarrassed.
“I guess I forgot to drink enough. I made it all the way to the armory,” he replied, trying to spare some dignity.
“Yes, I was there. Remember?” Elisa tried to remind him.
“Seven guns. The question is: who do we let have them?” Nikolaj asked a rhetorical question with the pile of weapons gathered over by his feet.
The air whispered into their ears while they attempted to sleep. They were hungry and thirsty with the return journey looming. Their heads ached, their feet were sore, and they did not fully comprehend the relative difficulty of walking back in the dark with full loads on their backs.
Elisa lay with her eyes wide-open thinking of the journey they would be making in several hours when the sun went down. Enric would be called on to carry a heavy load, and she wondered if he would be recovered and up to the task. His earlier words festered in her mind, indicative of deep resentment. She would reveal what she heard to Nikolaj soon enough.
When the primary star finally dipped below the horizon at the end of the long betaday, and they had gathered all they could possibly carry and seen all of the quiet and desolate remains of Gambler they cared to see, they set out in the manner in which they came. The partially covered skulls of their fallen comrades lay in the dirt smiling up at them as if to bid them ‘good luck’ while knowing the odds were against their survival on the alien planet. Some of the skeletons were bare, stripped of their flesh by the fires that burned after the crash. Those were the ones with the biggest smiles. Their death projected itself outward to Elisa with expressions void of the agony that had been taken away.
They trudged on the soft grassy field. They followed the path straight to the water and turned to walk along the riverside back toward the waterfall beyond the mountains. It was dark, but the second star provided enough light for them to make their way as it glistened on the glassy water. The group slogged alongside the river struggling to see clearly and wondering why Quasar had not come along to help them.
Elisa looked over the river surface as she tailed the group with Enric a few steps ahead of her. Disturbances beneath the water distorted the reflection of the secondary star. She thought nothing of it, but then something large rolled above the surface briefly and disappeared again. She could barely see it and looked back hoping to catch a better glimpse. It appeared again and submerged as before.
“Wait,” she said. “Something is there.”