“
Please, take it. We wouldn’t want it to go to seed here.”
“
Thanks!”
I ate the melon and then picked up the now full one-ton canister and carried it to the waterfall. I walked through the water, actually across the bottom of the pond because the water was over my head, to the other side. I set the canister on the shore and then climbed out. It all felt so easy with this amazing strength.
I saw nuclear fission flashes through the doorway and heard the high-pitched whir of engines. As I dashed out with the canister in my arms, the bay door opened and I leaped in. When I landed, the ship sank a half foot. I forgot that I was carrying a ton.
John looked at me with an expression of curiosity as the door shut behind me. The ship was rising even as the door closed.
“
You said you had the tritiated water, but you did not use the exoskeleton. We must have misunderstood you.”
I patted the canister. “It’s all in here. Where do you want it?”
He grabbed the canister to move it and then frowned when he could not budge it. “Bring it to the engine room.”
He led the way, and I carried the canister as easily as a bag of groceries.
“
Set it here,” he said.
I put the canister in the place he indicated and he hooked it up. He pushed some glowing buttons on a panel. There was a whooshing sound and then he disconnected it and moved the now empty canister himself. “Good work,” he said.
By the time we reached the cockpit, we were already orbiting the planet.
“
We are ready to depart,” John said.
Miranda looked at me and then back to the instrument panel, but her gaze came back to me immediately. “They warned me you were different, but nobody told me you work without pants.” She looked at me more closely. “There really isn’t much left of your shirt, either.”
“
Think of it as a perk,” I said.
“
Luckily, I can enjoy the little things in life,” she said with a nod toward my unrobed lower half.
“
Little?” I might have argued with her, but at that moment a wrenching pain gripped my stomach. I doubled over and fell to my knees.
“
Max? What’s happening?” she asked.
I felt John check my pulse. “He must be sick or injured.”
“
Thanks, Captain Obvious,” she murmured.
“
Strawberry melons,” I whispered.
“
You’re only hungry?” she asked. She sounded relieved.
I groaned. “Poisonous melons.”
Chapter 24. Max
John carried me to Tyler’s former quarters on the ship, but I hardly noticed the path or the destination. I was caught in the throes of pain I hadn’t felt before. Imagine your worst caffeine withdrawal headache pounding through your head and neck and then add in the sensation of drain clog remover eating through your digestive track while army ants nibble on your every nerve ending. I hoped for unconsciousness, but it didn’t come. Although I did experience various levels of awareness, aware of what was going on around me from the meta to quantum level, I never lost a sense of the pain that gripped every cell in my body.
I burned in exquisite ways. I spewed vomit; I thrashed; I screamed. None of it helped. My vision was red with the pain, and my tears seared my aching skin. Every hair follicle on my skin was the source of megatons of pain with the slightest contact of any fabric or any motion in the air. My throat and mouth burned from acid that was too vile to be from my stomach, and even my teeth roots betrayed me. My muscles contracted of their own volition and squeezed to the point of tearing tissue and separating joints, and even then the muscles did not release.
The pain might have been only equal to the worst torture. I was drowning in my own vomit, sporadically paralyzed, nauseous, dizzy, freezing cold in my limbs and burning hot in my head and chest. It was a messy affair of body fluids from every orifice and foul odors that might have been torture enough in their own ways. Each carried noxious toxicity, and in combination, they forced John to retreat.
I could only hope that my body would give out soon, I realized even as I noticed smaller changes like blood coming from my eyes and ears and my skin changing to a sickly black and blue. I assumed my organs must be dissolving to pudding, but somehow my nerve cells never quit, the pain signals to my brain unceasing. When I had nothing left to vomit, I was overtaken by dry heaves. I couldn’t tell which direction was up or down my vertigo was so bad, and the room spun out of control. I begged for death, but I was alone and there was no one to hear my begging.
When any other being’s body would have given out, my body regenerated, a painful process by itself but one that now lifted my suffering to the nth. I was aware when Miranda and John had extracted me from the room and stripped me of my clothes, carrying me to one of the holding cells, and I was aware when they sponged me off and put blankets on me. I became exhausted with sleep deprivation as hours turned to a day and then two. On the fourth day, I finally left consciousness, exchanging it for hallucinations and nightmares. Wendigo chased me, caught me, and ate me a bite at a time. Giant snakes swallowed and digested me slowly as I suffocated and burned in digestive fluids. Porcupine people stabbed me continuously and laughed at my pain. Eventually, I lay in a bed of hot coals and simply suffered.
When I woke, I was covered in sweat, blood, and urine. I shivered and convulsed. “I need a shower,” I croaked through dry and cracked lips.
“
Don’t try to stand,” Miranda warned me.
I ignored her and rolled off the cot onto the hard floor. The cool floor motivated me to my feet. I stumbled past her back toward Tyler’s cabin, where I was sure I would find a shower and possibly some clothes.
She hovered near me but didn’t touch me or stop me. “Be careful, Max. You’ve been unconscious for a day.”
My steps were wobbly and weak, but I made it across the small ship to Tyler’s quarters catching a glimpse of Miranda’s hopeless expression as I shut the door behind me. She looked like she hadn’t slept in days.
I found the shower, as I expected, and stood in hot water. I lost all track of time. When I eventually came back to myself, I turned off the shower, dried off, and dressed in some of Tyler’s looser clothing. I had been nearly twice his weight, but that was before going most of a week without food, having my arm bit off, and being poisoned. Now, his clothes fit a little snug but were passable. I noticed his bed had been stripped and sanitized, but there were traces of blood and fluid on the floor. I turned my back on the room and stepped back out into the main corridor. Miranda was waiting for me in the cockpit.
“
Better?” I asked.
She looked me over. “Where’s the flood?”
I looked down at the high-water pants. “I can take them off, if you’d like.”
Her eyes had circles under them and her hair was disheveled, but she gave me a smile. “Please strap yourself in. We’re going home.”
She pressed buttons on the flight console, and in a few moments, a pulse of blue energy shot out from the ship and tore a hole in space-time. We fell into the wormhole and back toward Earth.
Chapter 25. Max
The trip through the wormhole was a little nauseating in my current state, but otherwise nothing about it seemed abnormal. Then we emerged inside of the Earth’s atmosphere, which isn’t supposed to happen. There’s a reason you make wormholes in near zero gravity. The torque of gravity against the wormhole began to rip apart the ship.
“
You missed,” I said.
“
Not by more than a few hundred miles,” Miranda said defensively. “It’s not like I’ve ever flown one of these.”
I looked nervously at the distant ground. “I thought you were a pilot!”
“
I am a pilot, but I’ve only
seen
spaceships flown. I have only
actually
flown a few small planes.”
“
Well, I guess we’re all in for your crash course.”
John was still reclined in his seat, utterly unperturbed. “I’m glad I left some feed out for the chickens before we left.”
“
We’re almost free of the wormhole,” Miranda said. “When it releases us, we’ll begin to fall, and I’ll turn on the landing propulsion engines. There might be some damage to the ship and some systems.”
The ship groaned and creaked before it broke free of the wormhole, and thereafter we didn’t really fly toward the ground so much as engage in some creative spinning and flipping. I was glad my stomach was empty and that I was strapped in. I kept my gaze inside the cockpit to the extent I was able. I really didn’t want to see how fast the ground was coming toward us.
Miranda fought the controls, working feverishly to right the ship. “Cloaking on. If we make the news, it should be as a falling satellite or meteor.”
“
That’s comforting,” I said.
I heard a large creak and a snap. “We’ve lost the warp drive,” she said.
“
Do we need it? We’re in the atmosphere,” I said.
“
Well, it would have been nice to keep the ship in one piece while landing,” she said.
An explosion rocked the ship.
“
What was that?” I asked.
“
That was the warp drive,” John answered. “It likely destabilized without the magnetic containment field.”
“
Whatever the cause of the explosion, it just damaged both wings,” Miranda said.
“
We can still land, though. Right?” I asked.
“
Well, we can definitely put the ship on the ground,” Miranda answered.
“
If you don’t slow down our descent, we’ll probably put the ship about thirty feet into the ground,” John commented.
“
Everybody’s a backseat driver,” Miranda said.
A huge hunk of metal spun past the cockpit window.
“
What was that?” I asked.
“
Part of the wing,” John answered.
“
Do we need that part?” I asked.
“
It’s really only necessary when in the atmosphere. It’s completely irrelevant in space,” he answered.
“
Maybe we should put on parachutes or something,” I suggested.
“
Spacecraft are much too advanced for parachutes,” John responded.
I sighed. “That’s not very comforting when your spacecraft is breaking apart.”
Miranda jerked the control stick back and I felt the ship stabilize. We were still descending rapidly, and although we weren’t spinning, the entire ship trembled and groaned. Nobody spoke as the ground sped toward us. Miranda still frantically pushed buttons. Then the noise of our descent increased dramatically.
Miranda looked slightly relieved. “I’ve managed to extend flaps. That should slow our descent to a survivable impact.”
“
You meant landing, right?” I asked.
“
Right, survivable landing,” she corrected herself. “Five thousand feet. Four thousand. Three. Two. One! Brace yourselves!”
We rammed into the ground with the grace of a poorly spiked football. The cockpit erupted in rigid blue protective foam that obscured my vision and made it impossible to tell what was happening, but I had the sensation of tumbling and heard massive explosions. When we stopped moving, the foam receded, only a faint odor of burnt plastic remaining in its wake.
Miranda and John both were staring out the broken cockpit into what I assumed was the fresh Minnesota air. I felt rather invigorated. Survival against all odds always affects me that way.