Kraken Orbital (29 page)

These things
have
jet engines. They were supposed to
work in conjunction with the hyper drive to throw the rig into full
reverse upon landing. They wouldn’t do the job on their own but
they might slow the machine down enough to stop it killing me flat
on impact. I rush over to the console in the centre of the small
command room and start flicking through the on screen commands.
Most of them were utter jargon and may as well have been written in
Japanese. But I know what the pictures represent and I know what a
jet engine looks like. At least in it’s most basic form.

I have
to hold on tight as the ship enters the upper
atmosphere and the force of gravity starts to take over. The
feeling of speed and inertia is dizzying and upsetting but I hold
on. I have to. I want to pass out. I want to let go and just call
it a day but something drives me on. Something keeps my hands
gripped onto that console for dear life.

Now I
c
an feel it falling. In space it was
hung. In the absence of air and gravity and all other forces that
normally act upon anything on a world and it’s surface. There it
hung in a feeling of odd peace and serenity. But that is shattered
as the machine sped further and further to what is likely to be my
grave.

I
ke
ep cycling through the options on that
screen as my stomach churns this way and that as the craft I was
attempting to fly gathered more and more speed. There! I’m certain
it’s picture of a jet. In it’s most basic form but that it is. I
only have enough energy to slap the screen and hope my finger tips
hit something as the gravity and speed throw me asunder. It must
have worked.

The engine
roared into life with an ear splitting blast and
the power of it throws me from one side of the room to the
other. I slam my arm against one of the terminals on the wall and
fell in a heap to the floor. I preyed that it was enough. The
overwhelming feeling of fear had blinded me into submission and now
I’m out of ideas. There’s nothing else I can think of doing. I have
exhausted my options and done the best that I could. Now I just
have to lay here and hope.

I feel
the rig slow but only a little. The sand would
be soft enough to absorb the brunt of the impact. That’s what I
comfort myself with as I pathetically sob into my arm. There must
be something else! There has to be more I can do.

The
hyper
drive!
If I can just kick that back in
then just a small blast of the reverse thrust will save me
outright. It will be enough to balance out the dizzying effect of
the fall and slam the ship into the surface of the planet at just
the right time and speed to stop it from killing me. It’s a long
shot but it’s worth it.

I pull my
bruised and battered body off the floor and stagger back to the
machine in the centre of the floor. I start cycling once more
through the screens on the display. I wish I knew how much time I
ha
ve. I wish I could get the screen up
off the windows up front and see the world spiral ever closer but I
have no idea how to do it and have more important things to
do.

There
’s nothing. No screen that I
can find in my deadly spiral that looks familiar. I cry out in
frustration just as the jet engines fail on me too. The rig
suddenly speeds up once more and the alarms intensify yet again.
I’m breathing hard and on the verge of hyperventilating. Nothing I
can do. Just wait for the impact.

I
c
an hear and feel the bottom sections of
the rig crumple first. The explosions rocket around me and throw me
against every wall in the room. But it’s not over. The rig breaks
apart so fast and so intensely that I have no time to think.
About how it will feel to die.
The rig finally falls and I black out
immediately as the floor below me snaps and buckles. It throws me
one last time to the floor and there is nothing but black after
that.

I
c
an’t open my eyes for a long time. And I
shouldn’t have been able to either. Because I should have been
dead.

Chapter 21

One More Fall

It came to me
in that nightmare. I should have known from the start. I guess I’d
just forgotten. The escape pods on this kind of craft were built
around the uncertainty that launched it. The last relic to a cold
war. The last statement in a war of words fought over the
proliferation of who had the biggest and most
powerful bombs. The uncertainty of a new technology married
to a dying one. With the trust placed in the old and not the new.
The reliable old.

The escape
pods were wired to return to the motherland. To Russia. And they
were powered by another curious mixture of technologies. A more
basic and slower
hyper dive along with
gallons upon gallons of rocket fuel. That was how we could get out
of here. The escape pods on this ship had to be just that. There
was no rescue when this thing first launched. It was among the
first of it’s kind. The first deep space craft from which there was
little return. There would have been no rescue. If escapees needed
to get to safety then they had to get all the way to safety. I had
to get her there.

‘
Did you
sleep okay?’ Lucy ask
s me softly when I
finally manage to open my eyes. I don’t want to talk about it. That
was a crazy nightmare. It was horrible. Not often do I dream and
even less so are they so vivid. It had me a little shaken.
Shake it off.
I thought. Got to keep moving. No need thinking about silly
dreams like that. The answer had just come to me on how to get the
hell out of here. I needed to take that ticket and not get upset
about a nightmare.

‘
I didn’t get
much.’ I lie like usual. ‘How about you?
Dream about anything?’

‘Just about
you.’ Wow. That made a change. Instead of sending the usual shiver
down my spine whenever she said anything. It warmed me. Made me
feel useful and wanted for a change. I needed to focus on that and
carry that wave of energy to the end of this living
nightmare.

‘What about
me?’ I smile
. Openly for the first time
in a while and not a forced one either.

‘Just that
you make it. That you figure it out and get out of here.’ Her own
smile and openly playful demeanor suddenly changes but I miss it.
The conversation moves on and I don’t have time to think anything
more of it. I just want to stay positive and ride the energy she
had given me in those simple few words.

‘Well.’ I smile more broadly still. ‘Funny
you should say. I remembered where the escape pods are.’

‘
You
remembered?’ She spits
at me almost
sarcastically and openly derogatorily.

‘Yeah.’ I
recoil. ‘I guess it just came to me in my sleep.’ I explain but it
was almost an excuse. It sounded like one anyway. She just rolls
her eyes at me. Like a dumb kid or something. I wish I hated her
for it. But I must be so smitten with her I just liked her more for
it.

‘Hey, I
haven’t seen one of these before and it’s been a long time since I
had the time to drool over it’s blueprints like I did when I was a
kid.’

‘We’ve been trawling through this ship on our
last legs for days and you suddenly “remember” where the escape
pods are!’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘What!’ She
grew a bit aggressive but I like it. I don’t see her as a guard
anymore. I see her as a friend or something more I guess. I don’t
find her attitude threatening at long last. I found it all…
cute
.

‘I never said I knew where they were.’ I’m
poking fun at her and I like it even more as she bites. ‘I said I
remember it has them. Not that I know where they are.’ At last I
break her. She just punches me as hard as she can in the shoulder
and starts smiling. I guess that steak has lifted our moods. The
sleep will have helped too.

I stand up
and stretch as tall as I can. My back has
recuperated a little during the night, or whenever it was
that we slept, but still aches. My armor flexes and bows under my
moves and I wish I could take it off at long last but no such luck
just yet. Time to get going. The fire that I cooked on last night,
if it even was night, has died out completely and I really have no
way to know how much time has gone since we fell asleep. I pull
myself out of the carriage and out into the now cold
tunnel.

There must
have been an intense snow flurry during the time we had been
asleep. There had been more than one hole in the hull along the
rafters of the tunnel. Through those gaps newly fallen snow had
trickled in and blanketed the place in thin and slippery
layer.
I make sure to watch my step but
gradually slip out of the gap in the carriage I had blown up
myself. At least there were no more monsters. And at least the
lights were still working. Thin streams of light ebbed in through
the roof too. It was nice to see a bit of natural light too. I must
have caused most of those holes myself. The explosion might have
been a fair bit bigger than I had planned on or realized in the
immediate aftermath. The tracks up above had buckled and broken
too. To be expected.

Lucy
follow
s. Her hair is a mess but I like
that too. I just chuckle at her and she knows immediately what I’m
getting at. She frantically pulls at it and tries to flatten it
down a touch but it does little good.

‘Relax.’ I
urge her and take her hand to help her unnecessarily over the lip
of the window frame. ‘It looks nice.’

‘Oh great! A guy who likes the way I look in
the morning.’ She makes light of it and stops trying to flatten it
out.

The blast
door up ahead had been ripped right down the middle.
Just like I planned
. I let go of her, she’s fine on her own after all, and
make my way over the rubble towards it. I climb slowly and
carefully. Still not quite awake and no matter how long I had been
asleep for, it wouldn’t have been enough to recover from all of the
things I’ve been through.

I
d
on’t want to slip over in the thin but
slick layer of gradually melting snow and make myself look a bigger
idiot than I already had. I think back to what Lucy had said about
her dream. And also to what a mess I had made of the place. I like
the feeling it gives me. That I had clawed some of it back. Some of
that battered and bruised ego that had taken one too many hits over
the days I had spent on this horrid planet.

It
’s nice to know that when
things get really heated I can hold my own and even protect
another. I can’t help it from wandering. My thought chain turns to
Kolt. And I think he might even have been proud of me. I was
changing here. I was coming out of my skin or becoming a new man.
Either one. I don’t care. I like it.

The metal
that once lined the roof
litters the way
I need to go. It’s warped and twisted by the fire I had caused. But
cold now to the touch. I make my way precariously through the mire
of twisted girders and over to the door. Good thing Kolt had taught
me how to climb. Or I’d have no chance of getting up and over the
door.

The tear in
it was half way up. It was going to be a difficult climb of a
slippery and slick surface to reach the opening my explosion had
caused.
But I think I can do it. I wait a
while for Lucy to catch up. She looks, and sounds, a little groggy
today. So I give her space and time to wake up.

‘
Maybe we can
use some of this metal to build a
staircase of some kind.’ She must have seen it from a
distance and had started thinking of possible solutions to the
problem at hand. I have other ideas.

‘Nah.’ I
reach up to a small crack in the metal and test my grip on it. ‘I
can climb this. So can you.’ The heat of the flame must have warped
the steel into a nice rounded hold and there were more like it to
use as hand and feet holds in order to scale it. It probably looked
further than it was. Shrapnel from flying pieces of steel, bits of
track and dinosaur parts, must have slammed into the sheet metal of
the door and made tiny incisions and dents into it. We can use them
to hold onto.

I
fe
el strong. She makes me feel strong. So
I keep hold of that first hold without breaking for rest and move
onto the next, and the next and the one after that too.

There
are splits in the metal too. Designed ones.
Around access ports and maintenance docks. They will make the climb
easier and help me to trust my decisions. Lucy is climbing behind
me. Not as enthusiastically as me but climbing nonetheless. I’m
within reaching distance of the first part of the rip in the steel
but not quite able to get hold of it at full stretch.

No choice. I
bravely jump and grab hold of the frayed metal. I felt it cut into
my skin, even through the glove I had put back on, but I held on
anyway. I pull hard and swung my feet up to another small hold
where I could lever my w
hole body weight
in. The door is thick. And the explosion had torn right through it.
But it’s wide enough for me to stand in and not feel worried about
slipping down either side, into either half of the
tunnel.