Furnace (17 page)

That split-second hesitation all but guaranteed an eternity of suffering, and I knew it. Once the beasts caught you, they never let you go. I took small comfort knowing it had happened too late for me to dread my fate, regardless of how fervently I raged against the dying of the light.

God, please let my family know I love them.

It was an irrational thought considering it was a practical impossibility (even assuming that God exists) but any soldier will tell you that there are few atheists in a foxhole, and thinking back on it, I’m not surprised by my reaction at all.

The dead piranha-thing hit me full force while bits of its brain flew through the air. I tilted my head down and lowered my shoulder to brace for the blow, but the impact still carried me off the roof. Panicking, I kicked the corpse away from me as we flew through the air, then swung the SX back around to fire into the cascading demons I imagined following me over the edge.

Except they didn’t follow. The classical demon bowled right over onto the next roof—it must have been easier for them to find purchase along the golden dome with their claws, talons, and inhuman strength—and the confused horde followed right after it.

Holy shit…

The demon hadn’t been able to slow up in time, and the others were rushing after it so aggressively that they swept it along before it could alter course or warn them that I’d dropped into the alley.

I landed on my back in something wet and yielding with the piranha’s flailing legs atop my chest. Rather than trying to break free and take off down the street, I remained motionless while the monsters passed by overhead. I watched them with a sustained wince of apprehension, amazed by my dumb luck yet thoroughly expecting it to turn any moment. All it would take was one of them realizing what had happened, even the last one, and the end result would be the same as if they’d all seen. I would merely have prolonged the inevitable, and I’m not sure it actually counts as prolonging when you’re already dealing with eternity.

But the horde had such a single-minded purpose that every last one of them passed over the alleyway where I laid beneath the piranha-thing’s corpse in a wet bed, which I prayed was only wet from garbage and not sewage or decomposing bodies.

You’ve got to be kidding me
, I thought.

I stared up at the black storm clouds for several minutes after they passed, long after the growls and grunts and hammering footsteps faded back into the heart of the city. There was a huge part of me that was relieved, and yet a nearly equal part of me was disappointed. As long as I survived, I had to keep trying to get back to the
Hummel
, and the prospect of untangling myself from both the piranha and the filth beneath me just to slink into the shadows of the Greco-Roman buildings was so daunting that I briefly reconsidered pressing the SX to my temple to save myself the trouble.

No
, my conscience countered.
Remember what happened to Katrina. Aziza. Flaherty. Sillinger. Teemo. Chara. Remember how badly you want to get back to your family again. Remember how much you want to be home.

Slowly, the feeling returned to my arms and legs, though not the energy.

Remember what it’s like to be in a warm bed. Remember what it’s like to close your eyes and sleep.

I inched out from under the piranha and rolled down the pile to the damp ground.

Just close your eyes
, my mind continued. My body obeyed.
Remember what it’s like to sleep.

My face came to rest in the dust and stone safely within the building’s shadow.

Sleep.

I was too exhausted to resist the command. My body had bled every last drop of energy without any food, water, or rest, and with considerable injuries to boot. I was still recovering from Sillinger’s emergency surgery, after all, and probably needed one or two other minor operations just to get back into fighting shape. The prospect of sleep had never sounded so good in my life.

Just close your eyes.

Now that the immediate threat had passed, I felt my body’s internal systems beginning to shut down one by one.

Sleep.

And having brushed within kissing distance of death enough in the prior six hours to have forged an understanding with fate, I allowed myself to sink into the black nothingness on the other side of my eyelids.

Wherever you go, I will find you.

I was out for no less than two hours.

WATCHED

As far as I know, my sleep was uneventful, though I was so knocked out that I doubt even torture at the hands (or tentacles) of Furnace’s demons would have woken me before my body was ready. I didn’t have any
new
injuries, at least, and that was a good sign. If one of the monsters had indeed seen me lying in a pile of wet garbage beside the headless corpse of the piranha-thing, they must have mistaken me for another dead body and moved on without further investigation.

When I
did
wake, it took a moment to drum up the courage to open my eyes. I hoped I would hear a doctor’s voice back on the
Hummel
right away, informing me that while the short-term prognosis wasn’t great, I should pull through with a shitload of physical therapy and a can-do attitude. After several moments passed with no sound aside from the steady drip of liquid on stone, however, I accepted that my fortune hadn’t extended quite far enough for that happy ending. You might argue I’d been lucky up until that point, I guess. You might say I should have been grateful to be alive. I tend to consider myself ridiculously
un
lucky for having been thrust into the situation in the first place. But that’s just me. I still recognize that survival itself makes me a hell of a lot luckier than Salib’s team. I just had to accept that no one else was going to carry my ass back to the
Hummel
. I had to do it myself.

Any good soldier will tell you that waiting for the fleet’s heroic intervention to save you from the killing floor is about as helpful as pressing a VP to your temple and pulling the trigger. It’s even less helpful when the majority of your squad is gone, because that makes it easier for the big-wigs to write you off as an ‘acceptable’ loss. There’s a lot of bullshit in the media about how the fleet (or really any branch of the military) refuses to leave hostile territory until they’ve recovered all troopers and agents beyond enemy lines because it goes against the military code of ethics. The truth is, though, the fleet only cares about the fleet’s interests, and I’m not always one of them.

Millions of soldiers either volunteer or are conscripted from Earth’s colonies to afford the RSA the luxury of expendable pieces. They don’t give a shit about us as individuals. God bless Gibbons as he’s considered one of the few soldiers’ captains, but even
he
would have sounded the order to get the hell off Furnace the moment engines and primary systems were back online, regardless of who he left behind. I wouldn’t have blamed him if that’s the way it played out, considering how horrific the mission turned out to be. In that scenario, it would have been best for everyone involved if he just cut his losses. He was never given that option, of course, but that’s beside the point. The point is that no one but your squad looks out for you once the shit hits the fan.

As far as I know, my active squad was all dead, and they hadn’t really been
my
squad to begin with. That’s one of the downsides of being promoted to a bridge seat. You’re not really part of a team anymore. You’re assigned to missions, that’s all, and sometimes those missions last a while. Sometimes a captain even picks the same crew for multiple missions, and sometimes you make friends along the way and request to serve alongside them as often as possible.

But that all pales in comparison to the brother and sisterhood of an infantry squad, commando unit, or special ops team, where soldiers really look out for one another. Each one of you knows exactly what the others have been through, who they’ve lost, and how many days it’s been since they last saw home. You run every single mission together, and you’re hunkering down in the trenches with each other for most of them. Not sitting cozy in your quarters reading a novel or dicking around in SurReal World. Not even locked in a stasis pod while your vessel hurtles across the galaxy. Instead, you’re burying each other on alien planets or digging bullets from each other’s legs while mortar shells rain down around you. You’re vomiting at the sight of decapitated human colonists who’ve been desecrated by some ruthless alien species solely interested in documenting Human culture. It sucks, and it’s cathartic.

In that sense, you lose brothers and sisters who are closer than family when you take a bridge seat, but you also don’t have to deal with the day-to-day horrors they experience on the front lines. Unless you’re like me. Then, you still do.

The only exception is if you become a pilot, a navigator, a tactical officer, or an engineer on a genuine fleet warship like the
Doorway
, in which case you’re pretty much in it for the long haul. Then you get to form those deeply-rooted bonds with your crew. But you’ve got to work your way up to that. It’s a hell of a lot of responsibility to command a warship in any capacity, and I haven’t decided yet whether or not I want to take that jump. My guess is it will take a while.

I realize that this may seem like a digression from waking in a city gutter, but that’s what ran through my head as I writhed around in the heap of refuse plotting my next step, and I’ve vowed to be as thorough and accurate with this account as possible. I knew I couldn’t count on anyone, and at least in this case, that was a good thing. If I’d waited for the cavalry to swoop in and rescue me, I would still be waiting.

Even after the two hours of rest, my body was weary to the core. I didn’t know if I could stand up and keep moving. Also, I didn’t have a clue
where
in the city I’d wound up aside from a general recollection of hurdling rooftops. I’d used up all the pulse charges before I’d dropped the rifle and moved onto the SX, which had something like ten bullets left in the chamber by my estimation. On top of all that, I didn’t know if the crew of the
Hummel
was still alive or if the ship had been overrun. I assumed they hadn’t left the planet yet, but it would have been just my luck if they
had
considering the way things were going that day.

So what was my incentive to get up and venture onto the city’s main street?

Nothing. Simply nothing.

I was tired of running. Tired of pain. Tired of thirst. Tired of terror. Tired of the sights and smells of the fucked-up monsters and their appetites, which well exceeded my comprehension as a (relatively) sane human being, even one who has seen some horrific shit in his day (if this account isn’t evidence enough, I’m willing to provide additional examples from the Kalak War). In a way, it was peaceful lying in a gutter on an alien planet with the acid of the piranha’s blood eating through my suit. It wasn’t spectacular, but at least I didn’t
have
to run if I didn’t feel like it. Part of me wanted to stay there until I died. If any more demons came poking around, I’d just play dead until they wandered off. And if they didn’t wander off, so be it.

Is this what Katrina died for?
my conscience at last spoke up.
You broke her leg so she couldn’t escape those bastards, and then she stood up for all of you while you froze in fear. You owe it to her. She gave you a chance to live.

It was a harsh assessment, perhaps, but that’s the sort of pep-talk I needed at the time. I was beyond the point of reaching the
Hummel
for my own sake. My will wasn’t just waning, it was swirling down the goddamned toilet. I had to latch onto a greater cause.

“Fine,” I sighed, propping myself up by the elbow and leaning against the domed cathedral. “I’ll go.”

The reflection from the golden dome illuminated the marble roof across the way even without the aid of starlight. Furnace was self-illuminated, which was impossible but the reality nonetheless, so I guess it made sense that the buildings operated the same way. I don’t know. None of it really makes sense when you start dissecting it, and this isn’t even the fucked up part. I didn’t realize just how much that cathedral (or mosque or synagogue or temple or whatever the populace called it) would stick with me once I returned to Earth.

As I’ve previously noted, the city was heavy on familiar Greco-Roman architecture, but the cathedral took it to another level. It looked like an exact copy of a building I’ve seen in datapads from the Second Dark Ages. Long before my time. The Earth structure was destroyed by the now defunct caliphate as a final, desperate punishment to the people who’d risen up to eradicate them, but the image has endured across the centuries. On Furnace, it was big, imposing, and utterly out of place among the decrepit city buildings. My eyes were repeatedly drawn to it.

Why don’t you go in there and check it out?
a voice asked.

It wasn’t that simple. Churches are traditionally viewed as places of sanctuary, but I had no desire to find out what twisted religion the Furnace demons practiced, assuming it could truly be called ‘religion’ at all. I couldn’t ignore the potential for finding answers inside, though, and it was right next to me. I needed a feasible objective to get moving again and I didn’t see any immediate alternatives. If I thought too hard about crossing the whole city, descending the crater to reach the
Hummel
, then waiting for the ship’s systems to come back online so I could even
attempt
to figure out where the fuck we were in relation to the rest of the universe, I would be paralyzed.

So I pushed myself to my feet, fought the black splotches of unconsciousness that leapt to the forefront of my vision, and shuffled over to the dripping gutter-liquid for a drink. I figured that no matter what it was, the liquid would feel better going down than continuing to swallow with a dry throat. The taste was bitter, but it soothed some of the raw burn. It wasn’t pure enough to solve my dehydration problem, but I hoped it would buy me a few extra minutes down the road.

Wiping my mouth, I turned and limped along the wall until I rounded the corner onto the main street.

The road appeared empty, just like it had been when I’d first entered the city. This time, though, I had a feeling it really
was
empty. No one seemed to be watching from the shadows. Even the clown’s voice inside my head had fallen eerily silent for some time, and though the view reminded me of the room where he’d briefly held me as his prisoner, I didn’t sense he was near.

Don’t trust it
, I thought.
He’s better than that, and this is
his
playground. If he hasn’t taken you yet, it’s because he’s not ready to, or
you
aren’t ready to go. But he’ll find you. Just like he said.

It wasn’t exactly a reassuring thought, so I pushed it away and limped to the marble steps leading to the cathedral doors.

Then I heard a low growl echoing from the alley across the street and froze mid-step.

Shit
, I thought.
What now?

Keeping my breath steady and my arms locked tightly against my body, I pivoted toward the noise. I thought about reaching for the SX pistol but worried the sudden movement might force the hand of whatever was quietly stalking me through the city.

Whoever it is, why hasn’t it attacked me yet?
I wondered.

No matter how skewed the creature’s perception was—and I had reason to believe every monster on Furnace was demented to some extent—it was plain enough to see that I was in dire straits. I didn’t have another battle left in me. The way things were going, I thought I might not even have another
step
.

“What do you want?” I asked. My voice cracked over every word. My throat was so dry it felt like I was gargling barbed wire. I didn’t get an answer though, and I couldn’t see into the darkened alleyway across the street.

By my reckoning, that left me with two options. I could either pretend I hadn’t heard anything at all, head straight into the cathedral, and hope some form of black-magic or general good luck would prevent the creature from following me inside, or I could limp across the street and confront my stalker. All things considered, I figured the former was my best bet. I wasn’t in any shape to pick fights and there was at least a fifty percent chance I’d imagined the noise in the first place. I was on high-alert, after all, and when you’ve been buried in the trenches as many times as I have, you tend to distrust silences. Your mind starts to play with you, if only to keep you on your toes for when something bad really demands your attention.

I turned back toward the cathedral door, careful not to rush in case the movement set something in motion I didn’t want any part of. You never know what will spook someone when they’re intent on spying on you. Also, it hurt to move, and especially quickly. Each step was accompanied by an anticipatory wince.

The moment my trembling hand reached for the door, however, I heard the pound of boots over the road and snapped back to attention.

It was the hooded Watchman from the corpse fields. The one with the scythe, although it didn’t look like he was carrying a weapon this time around. Somehow, I’d failed to notice him following me into the city despite having a bird’s eye view of both the corpse fields and the city itself on several occasions. I guess I’d been a little preoccupied.

How?
I wondered, then realized it was a stupid question. I’d been unconscious for a long time in the alley. Even if the demon was an imbecile, he could easily have followed the trail of corpses I’d left in my wake until he happened upon my general area. After that, even if he hadn’t found me, he would only have needed to duck in the shadows and wait for movement to trap me.