Kraken Orbital (15 page)

‘
There is a
chasm between this face of rock and the sheltered section. I have
to jump.’ I look for him. There is no way to see if there is a
solid ground below or ju
st a vast expanse
of nothing. If he jumps and is wrong we will both just tumble down
the side of the mountain to our certain death.

And that’s
how I know the Morris-Cooper Mining Company didn’t kill off my last
glimmer of hope.
Because I do
require rescue. Because I desire it. Because I want a better life
and there is still some shining light of a though glimmering inside
of me that believes I will one day see it happen
. But I shake my head at him in protest anyway. I don’t
want my new friend to die either. Even if he does make me look like
a chimp at every turn.

‘
We can just
find another way mate.’ I summon my most comforting tone and out it
to
full use. I even reach out an open
palm to pat him gently and somewhat affectionately on the shoulder.
‘You don’t need to jump if you think…’

Too late. He let go. Kolt, irritating even in
the face of death, springs elegantly from the safety of the slanted
wall, turns one hundred and eighty degrees in the air and spreads
his arms like a bird taking flight to control his direction. In
seconds he is gone and I start to genuinely hyperventilate.

‘
Kolt!’ I
scream to no reply.
‘Kolt!’ I hang on the
name and drag it out in my hoarse voice for as long as I can. Still
no reply. My heart sinks what feels like the full length of my body
and I can feel my entire central nervous system go completely
numb.

I know what I have to do. I know I trust him.
But there is something else too. I want to jump. I can feel it. It
is fear, I know what fear feels like having experienced it in all
its known forms, but there is desire mixed in there too.
Excitement, joy and purpose. I can feel, no, I can hear a powerful
voice urging me on. “Jump” it says in my head “go on, jump” and it
repeats again and again.

The thoughts
and voices steady me, fills me
with
elation so powerful that it blankets my every thought of fear, and
I can’t help but smile as my grip takes its own control of the
situation and lets go.

Before I have
any chance to change my mind my
body
slips and tumbles away to the ground. The wind whips past my long
hair and rumbles in my ears as I fall. I am instantly filled again
with focus as I adjust my eyes the best I can to the darkness that
follows. I can feel the cold wind and flakes of snow blasting past
my tumbling body but before I know it, my legs impact the edge of a
gradual slope that carries me gently into a dark recess in the
mountain side. Kolt is waiting there for me. Poised and emotionless
as usual.

‘
I did not
think you would let go.’ He speaks first as I jump to my feet like
a kid at an amusement park. I fight the urge to shout out that I
want to do it all again even though it
wouldn’t be a lie. I shake my head, not from disapproval at
what he said, but at the fact I can’t order my thoughts well enough
to express them.

‘I can’t describe…’ I take my first shot at
it but come up with nothing. ‘Why did I want to do it?’ Kolt,
though I cannot see his jaw nor make out his facial expression,
smiles. I can tell because the wrinkles around his baggy red eyes
intensify above what would be his cheek line.

‘
It is in all
of us.’ He begins as I try to shake off the head pounding rush of
adrenaline. I place my hands on my hips and stagger around the
echoing space. ‘We all desire and welcome a fall. It might be a
remnant of our ape descendants. But I do not think so. I believe it
be an element of self destructiveness
we
all have.

A small part
of us all desires pain, be it physical or emotional. We desire it
to define us. We
need
it to define us in an age where we have no
definition. No great purpose for us to fight for, nothing to blind
us from our own mortality.’ I have all but stopped listening to
Kolt as he hammers out his macabre feelings on the matter. My head
has mostly settled and I have taken to assessing our new
location.

The crevasse
is deep and I am in some ways amazed we made the fall at all. The
slope that carried us safely to the rocky bed is too steep to climb
back up so we are utterly committed at this point.
The recess forms a sort of long corridor that
stretches out in front of us. The snow lightly flakes down the
column, what little of it manages to escape the billowing and
relentless wind, and lies at our feet.

The
loss of the wind has definitely taken a chill
factor away but it is still deathly cold. Kolt can’t have come this
way. He wouldn’t have been able to climb the sheer vertical and
ominous slabs to our either side. I could ask him but I doubt it
will end in an explanation that isn’t marred with his patchwork
memory.

I guess he
must have discovered this recess while exploring and mapped it
somewhere in his fractured mind.
My
assumption is better than bothering to ask. I’m more interested in
why he isn’t fazed at all by the death defying leap. I’ll ask him
later.

‘
I wish we
had kept some of that snake.’ I remember that was the last thing I
had eaten. My stomach, since my focus and adrenaline is
waning, is starting to rumble very loudly. I
clutch it with an open palm like it will help but it surely
doesn’t.

‘
Let’s
continue.’ Kolt raises a hand, his leather bound and soaking wet
apron creaking with the move, and points down the shaft into the
darkness ahead.

I can smell
burning. That putrid, but somehow homely and pleasant, smoky
smell.
I don’t know where it is coming
from and I can’t see any visible sign of smoke or fire but it is a
tantalizing smell indeed. It seems to be hung in the air though. It
seems distant but at the same time not far away.

It feels somehow less than real. It feels
feint but still ingrained and ever present. This might sound odd,
but it feels like how it is to remember smoke. Not a smoke that is
present, flaring and offensively weaving its way up your nostrils,
but a feint whiff that conjures up the thought and with it the
memory of smoke.

I must be imagining things and decide it best
to just shake it off. Kolt has already walked on and I need to
catch up with him.

A few paces down the damp corridor and there
he is. He seems distant. More so than usual. For the sake of our
new found relationship I decide to challenge him and ask what the
matter is.

‘Everything ok?’ My voice echoes up the long
columns of exposed rock.

‘No.’ I can’t help but to recoil at his
honesty. He turns and I can see him crying inside of his gas mask.
His tears wash slowly around his red stained eyes as he tried in
vain to blink them away. I am filled once again with fear and more
as I place my hand on his shoulder.

I feel deeply sorry for him but I don’t know
why. I feel scared for him, and agreeably for myself as well, and I
simply don’t know what to say to him. An orange light is emanating
from inside of his mask. A light that looks like the beginning of a
fire. Shivers run down my back and arms as I realize what they are.
As I see flames start to lick at him from under his garish
apron.

He raises an
agonized fist and juts it forward to where the rocky corridor opens
up into a plane of bright daylight and fresh snow. I see his ship
for the first time and my emo
tions
immediately mix together.

I am filled
with c
hild like excitement at the
prospect of seeing a Kraken Class and fulfilling that juvenile
dream, and then with a sudden realization of a forgotten truth.
Something I knew. Something I had figured out long ago and
deliberately hidden from my conscious thoughts.

His ship was
cracked and broken, shred to bits and mostly buried
in the volumes of snow, but the fires had long
ago gone out. The Russian Federation flag along its cresting side
was long out of date and the paint was cracked and peeling away
from its titanic body.

The metal was
dated, rusted, and
was returning slowly
to the ground. I said, through fear shaken decibels:

‘
I thought
you had
just
crashed?’ I had to ask him. What choice did I
have? I needed him to validate what I already sensed was true. I
needed him to say it. I needed him to remember it for himself and
then bring me in on his big secret. I looked back to see him
utterly enveloped in flames but doing nothing about it. As if
reliving his last horrific moment.

‘
I remember
now. I know why I do not desire rescue. I know why I am lost and
not afraid.’ He was starting to shout and stood tall, threateningly
poised and aggressively motioning forward with tiny baby like
step
s towards me.

I started
backing away in frozen terror as I watched him burn in thick red
and black flames. I stumbled on an icy shelf and fell flat to the
floor.
A sharp icy blade penetrated the
back of my skull and white sparks flew over my eyes as I started to
pass out from immediate blood loss.

‘
Because I am already dead
!’ He
shouts as my eyes fade into black with every elongated blink. He
embraces the fire as it culminated in a second phase of intensity.
He screamed, louder and deeper than before.

‘
I
am dead and so are my comrades
. Their
spirits and lost souls wander and pollute this land.’ I can’t
visualize his anger as my eyes finally close. So very angry.
At himself? At me? At finally
reaching death’s door, so he can no longer pretend he is still
alive and fester in wait, wandering like a ghost?
I finally give in to blood loss and pass out.
Scared and alone.

‘
I am dead
and have been for years. I have been pretending, assuming life when
I have none to assume. I was afraid to die and let go. I am
n
ot afraid anymore! Come for me
Death!’

Chapter 11

The Kraken Class

I can’t open my eyes. Even though the space
outside my head is silent and void, I daren’t open my eyes to meet
the nothingness. I can’t bring myself to admit he is gone. Kolt was
my friend. I can’t believe in what happened. I just don’t want
to.

There has to
be some kind of other explanation. Even though my body is cold and
I must be e
ntering the first, if not
later stages of hypothermia, I don’t want to get up.

I can’t face
it alone.
This world will eat me whole,
chew me up and spit my bones out if that man isn’t around to save
me anymore. I don’t have to lie to myself. I can be honest here in
the confines of my own thoughts. I can admit I’m scared. My ego has
taken such a battering lately that it will hurt it no more to beat
it again.

Kolt kept me safe where otherwise I would
have died. I can’t bring myself to think he had been anything less
than real.

Private
Kolter Gespenst. It hit
s me right now
what his unfortunate surname meant in Russian. Ghost. I was never
one with a flair for language but I know that. I’m not sure I
remember how. Just one of those tid-bits of information that your
mind stubbornly holds onto for no reason at all.

Private
Kolter Ghost… Private Kolt Ghost.
Poltergeist.
I want to laugh at
the irony.
Even if I can call
it irony
. Unfortunate? Coincidental? But
another thought enters my mind even though I want nothing other
than to chase it out.
Had I
dreamed the whole thing?

I know of times when people have dreamed up a
superior identity to protect themselves during times of great need.
I had scoffed at the stories about those kinds of people. They said
the mind sometimes needed it. It sometimes needed to relinquish
control and hand it over to someone or something less than real to
take the noose from around their necks.

The
unconscious mind dreamed up a powerful entity
in order to save its conscious partner.
Is that what I had done?
Every time we hit a problem, Kolt had embarrassingly
outmatched me. Physically, mentally and in durability. The thought
sickened me so much that I opened my eyes and pulled my stiff and
iced body to stand without flattering or indulging myself with the
time to regain blood flow.

The thought hurt in ways I didn’t know
thoughts could. I already missed him. I pained for him. Like a
parasite ripped from his host, bringing their symbiosis to an
unsolicited end. I longed for him. My friend. I mourned for him.
And he may never have even existed.

My eyes
eventually focus. Quite some time after my stubborn legs start
carrying me towards the decayed space ship.
I don’t trust in them at first. What they tell me they can
see. How could there be anyone else here with me?

I can see the
figure of a woman in the distance. I can make out her
gorgeous
curves through the hail storm. I
can see her standing tall and confident, her weight resting over
one hip in a sexy pose. Her long legs I can just make out through
the flanking snow, and even her long, flowing copper red hair. I
know her. I can hear her crying into her hands.