Furnace (23 page)

Hell.

Furnace was Hell. Literal Hell. Gehenna, not just outside of Jerusalem but outside of the universe altogether. In other words, utter separation from the universal entity called God. It may seem like I’m being melodramatic, and you may have trouble believing me, but it’s true. Not just a personal hell, either, or a really awful place that
resembled
Hell. It was
Hell
, with a capital H, and the evidence was all around me. The Judeo-Christian tale of the fallen angel was right there on the wall of the maintenance shaft, woven into the history of the lonely planetoid in exquisite detail. In this case, the fallen angel was an evil clown creature who’d been banished from an idyllic planet to a wasteland along with his legion disciples, but that still sufficiently aligns with my understanding of Lucifer’s fall. Since then, his people have been doomed to spend eternity separate from the rest of the universe except for the souls they lure to share in the unending misery.

Like me, for instance, and the entire crew of the
Rockne Hummel
. Because of one innocuous course alteration, we’d been assimilated into the damned forever.

“We’re fucked,” I said aloud. The words took on a new meaning the longer I considered the evidence.

Hell is a real place, I continued to remind myself. A planetary-mass object (not truly a planetoid since it orbits nothing at all) you can reach by ship, although you’ll need some help along the way.

Hell exists
, I mouthed.
Hell exists.

I repeated the words over and over again in my head. Chewed them back and forth to get the full flavor without truly digesting their meaning.

Hell exists.

Hell is a real place. And not filled with invisible demons who spend their entire existence convincing people to do bad things. Hell is a planet. A tangible body. And the Devil—Lucifer, Satan, clown king, whatever name you prefer—is not a fallen angel but an exiled alien of tremendous, maniacal power. Namely, the power to extract ships from open space and transport them to Furnace so he and his minions can feed upon their misery.

It sounds very gothic (perhaps downright Christian) to say that he uses suffering for sustenance, but when you’ve been out in deep space as often as I have, you realize that there are endless metabolic demands and endless methods for extracting energy from organic matter. My guess is that these creatures are able to metabolize the chemicals many humans and aliens release when they experience significant amounts of pain, and that the clown king could sense these species (smell them, if you will) from great distances. Somehow, our flight path had skirted within range of the clown king’s influence, and that’s how we’d wound up in the middle of absolute nowhere…or perhaps the center of everything.

That’s not an excuse for my failure by any stretch of the imagination. I still know that I must have fucked up the calculations somehow, and that if I hadn’t tinkered with the flight plan to test my theories and shave a little time from our journey, we never would have been culled in the first place. The clown king—Satan, if you prefer—would have located another doomed ship and extracted its crew in our stead. Food would still have been plentiful on Furnace and we would be safely on our way to Marvek so Gallagher could take care of her political business. Chara would still be alive. Sillinger, too. Flaherty, Salib, Aziza, Katrina, and countless others. I have all of them on my conscience, and much more. Fuck-ups like this one are different than mistakes made in the heat of battle, or even taking the life of another creature that’s trying to kill you in open warfare. They stick with you. They keep you up at night because they could have been avoided so easily. The ‘ifs’.

If I’d stuck to the flight plan. If I’d never slept with my ex on Europa Station. If I’d let Teemo shoot the flare as soon as we’d found Tscharia.

If any of that had happened, things would be different, and that kills me. We wound up in Hell because of me. It doesn’t get much more spectacularly traumatizing than that.

No matter how eagerly people on Earth attempt to exonerate me, or tell me there was no way I could have anticipated our abduction simply because we’d re-routed, it doesn’t make a difference. In fact, it makes things worse. Especially when someone suggests there’s no way to know what could have happened if I
hadn’t
altered course. We could have been hijacked by pirates. Blown to pieces by a Kalak cruiser. Abducted and sold as zoo animals or slaves to any number of planets. We could have botched the landing on the colony and everyone would have died, destroying the
Hummel
in the process. But that’s all bullshit to me. At least in those situations, the pain would have been over in the blink of an eye for those we lost. On Furnace, their spirits are eternal, as are the twisted souls of their tormentors. It wouldn’t be just a flash of suffering, then, or even a lifetime of it. A thousand lifetimes. A million.

“Why did you want me to see this?” I asked the humming drone of the spaceship. I wondered briefly how long it had been buried there, and how long it had been since the clown king visited our solar system. How else would his legend have reached the green hills of Earth?

Of course, there was no answer. Or if there was, it was hidden in the decoding of the panels along the maintenance shaft, and I didn’t have time to follow them down to the cathedral and back again. I didn’t even have time to ask rhetorical questions of the ghost ship. I had to keep moving, even faster now that I knew the clown king’s true identity. I guess I’d suspected it all along, but in a tongue-in-cheek way which fell well short of belief until the evidence was right in front of me.

Stepping carefully around the pedestal, I limped deeper into the ship without looking back. There was enough light to see ahead for a while, although the red lights disappeared the moment I crossed to the other side of the pentagram (and who knew the significance of that little artifact; could it have been the coat of arms for the clown king’s people back before they’d been exiled? A symbol of their planet?).

I walked for a while in a half-dead stupor, favoring my right side where my ribs were exposed to the stale air, stumbling drunkenly over drainage grates and exposed wiring from the long, steel tubes overhead.

It’s too late
, I thought to myself over and over again. It became my mantra as I pushed away from the satanic cathedral. My prayer.
It’s too late. Everyone on the
Hummel
is either dead or dying. We’re all damned.

But I couldn’t shake the core question underlying the revelations of the ancient ship, which seemed to be of tremendously greater import than the hopelessness of my situation. Namely, if Hell exists and Satan is a twisted alien banished from creation, does that mean God exists, as well? And if there is an all-powerful entity capable of exiling an entire culture from the known universe as punishment, who should I fear most? The degenerates of the system, or the system itself? When I direct prayers skyward in my hours of most desperate need, whether in a foxhole somewhere or when dealing with private tragedies in my humble apartment back in Detroit, who is listening? Will an omnipotent being concern itself with my best interests? I suspect not. I suspect it has its own agenda which extends eons beyond the pathetic reach of my lifespan.

It’s a disturbing line of thought to say the least, and I’m still not sure I’ve arrived at satisfactory answers.

After a while, the shaft turned pitch-black again, but I kept walking. I didn’t know what else to do. Ten minutes later, I emerged on the bottom deck of the
Rockne Hummel
, and my heart nearly broke from shock and exhaustion. My mind had already been shattered.

HUMMEL

The horrors didn’t end there, of course. I was still on Furnace, and as far as I knew, the ship was still incapacitated, possibly even overrun by the monsters who swore allegiance to the clown king of Tscharia.

All I wanted to do was stay exactly where I was and allow sleep to serve up pleasant dreams of another world. I needed water first, though, or the sleep that took me would be death. I was hungry enough to eat conduit shells, too. But I’d been trained well enough to know water was my most pressing need. If I got water from the mess hall there’d be food nearby anyway, unless they’d started locking down resources for rationing since I’d left. It was possible, but I thought it more likely that Gibbons would have devoted all hands to ship repairs. He had to know any food and water that remained on the ship would run out if we didn’t leave the planet as soon as possible. We needed to find another rock with more abundant resources right away to have any chance at surviving an FTL jump toward home.

Gallagher might have protested (Crown politicians are always looking for pseudo-democratic solutions to these sorts of problems without any concept of the big picture or the stark realities of survival) but, ultimately, she would have been overruled. Captain Gibbons always toed the line in terms of following orders from Crown Representatives, but he was also a realist with the unwavering loyalty of his crew…even when some of us weren’t sure he was doing the right thing.

Water.

I focused on breathing, calculating the amount of energy it would take to stand.

You can’t quit now. Not when you’re this close to making it.

I wasn’t sure what ‘making it’ meant or whether it would even be worth the trouble, but I knew I at least had to
try
after everything I’d been through.

Water.

I opened my eyes and shifted my weight slightly, suddenly aware that my muscles were stiffening at an alarming rate. I was dehydrated. The longer I waited to find water, the worse the pain would get.

Don’t worry
, my mother’s voice called out from the corridor directly across the way. Her severed head was propped on the grated walkway, staring at me.

Wherever you go, I will find you
, she mouthed. Her lips curled back in a cruel smile. Black bile seeped through her teeth.

No…

I blinked and she was gone.

I struggled to my feet using the wall for support, only crying out once when I put too much pressure on my swollen knuckles, then turned back toward the darkness. I was convinced I’d be staring back down the maintenance shaft of the ancient spacecraft. The one that had carried the Devil to eternal exile. But there was nothing. Just a solid, steel wall with the
Hummel’s
fleet designation stamped across it and an arrow to the nearest emergency medical supply kit.

Water, or bandages?
I wondered.

I decided yet again that water had to be my primary objective. Once I had a drink, I could collapse somewhere and patch myself up with the med kit as thoroughly as possible until I located one of the three doctors aboard the
Hummel
. They weren’t all trained for medical emergencies but I figured I was better off enlisting their help than one of the rough fleet officers, who usually didn’t know what to make of a med kit unless they were treating a common battlefield injury like a sprained wrist. Even then, I didn’t trust their ‘expertise’.

I aimed for the corridor where I’d seen my mother’s head and tried—unsuccessfully—to block the image from creeping into my thoughts. I was too exhausted to be frightened or even repulsed by it, though. Those nightmares didn’t start until I was safely within the boundaries of our solar system again.

Even now, I don’t know how I managed to navigate the three hundred feet of banking corridors to the mess hall without falling over dead or unconscious. Maybe it was the idea that the clown king might appear from the shadows behind me and decide he’d changed his mind: I
would
have to hang myself over the altar of the golden-domed cathedral, after all, or stake myself to the wall like the others.

He never appeared though, and eventually I reached the mess hall. The lights over the food processing stations were blinding after such prolonged darkness, but I was glad for the clarity even if it gave me a migraine (which it did). My luck didn’t end there, either. Apparently, even if the captain
had
assigned crews to gather resources for rationing, they hadn’t reached the bottom decks yet. There was plenty of water left in the still-tank and a mountain of nutrient bars stacked in a bin by the sink. I binged on both. In fact, I drank so much water that I vomited on the mess hall floor, and then drank some more to offset the lost fluids.

The next twenty minutes or so passed in a fog. I heard faint explosions high overhead, probably on the bridge level, but they didn’t concern me all that much. I was just happy to be alive, on a fleet ship, and with an opportunity to rest for a moment even if it meant I’d be worse off in the long run. I couldn’t go any further until I’d rested. I was sure of it. I could feel death creeping up on me in every shadow, every breath.

You made it
, I thought.

I could picture the clown king grinning at me with his black gums and razor-sharp teeth. Shaking his head.

Not yet
, he mouthed.

I closed my eyes and shuddered.

Explosions suddenly rocked the bottom deck a few hundred feet from my position. I heard frantic shouts. Someone barking orders. It didn’t mean shit to me.

But it will. Soon
.

“Damn it,” I groaned, getting to my feet for what I swore would be the last time before I slept a week straight.

Brushing the caked dirt and blood from my face with the arm of my suit, I limped over to the emergency weapons locker near the mess hall entrance and used my code to break the latch. Alarms started ringing immediately, but I didn’t think anyone would notice or care with everything else happening aboard the
Hummel
just then.

I carefully selected an SX-70 from the trio of weapons and checked to make sure it was loaded. It was. I flipped the safety off and shuffled back into the corridor, aiming toward the shouts and explosions that continued rattling the ship’s bowels.

Chalmers’ last stand
, I thought to myself, feeling every bit a gunslinger as I stumbled down the passage.

Within moments, a group of fleet soldiers started running toward me. They didn’t acknowledge me at all except as an obstacle in their escape path. Indistinct shapes trailed them from the darkness, but none of the soldiers were firing.

Elizabeth Gallagher—the Crown Representative who didn’t have a sneeze of combat experience anywhere on her otherwise impressive resume—brought up the rear of the group. She was the only one firing at the pursuing shadows and all she had to work with was a YK pistol, which was the weakest weapon on board. One specifically issued to Crown Representatives on deep space missions with the caveat that they weren’t to be used unless ‘all other options had been exhausted’. It was a suicide weapon, in other words. An insurance policy so that valuable Earth intel could not be leaked through torture or other methods of extraction.

God, I loved her in that moment. Not in a romantic way, necessarily. Not even platonic. I don’t know how or why exactly, whether it was the futility of firing a YK into an onrushing horde that wanted to tear her apart and desecrate her corpse, or the fact that she was the only one among a group of trained fleet soldiers who was firing
anything
at the enemy. It took balls, and I respected the hell out of her.

She nearly tackled me as she ran past, still staring back into the growling shadows at the end of the corridor which had at last begun to flood into view. The impact startled her so badly that she squeezed the trigger and nearly pasted me through the eye, but I was too tired to care.

For a lingering moment, she stayed pressed against me, studying my face as if she were decoding every misery that had befallen me since leaving the
Hummel
and couldn’t believe what she saw. Then the distance cleared from her eyes and she locked onto me with startling clarity. With relief.

“The engines just came back on line but the ship’s overrun.”

I nodded weakly and directed her behind me.

“Run,” I told her.

She did, but not before firing another three shots into the onrushing demons.

I stared them down as they approached. Their expressions were indistinct in the dim illumination of the ship’s bowels, and that was oddly disappointing. I wanted to see their faces twist in agony when the SX bullets ripped through them. I wanted to see them hurt.

Oh well
, I thought.
I’ll settle for pissing on their corpses afterward.

I opened fire with the semi-automatic and blew those bastards to hell before they were within ten feet of me. Damn, it felt good, even though the recoil against my chest made my vision treble and my legs weaken.

Once they were all dead (or something like it), I staggered down the corridor in the general direction Gallagher and the others had retreated. Gallagher was waiting for me, standing with legs locked, arms down at the sides of her official Crown uniform, the YK pistol gripped firmly in her right hand like some action hero of a bygone era. Back before the stakes had been so high.

“How many more?” I asked. My voice sounded a little better than it had before. I don’t think it will ever be quite the same.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Comms just went down again, but engines are running. We have crews on every deck trying to clear them out.”

By ‘them’ she meant the natives, and it was encouraging to hear there was a coordinated effort to drive them off the ship. Although, if the example I’d just seen from our soldiers was any indication of the level of efficiency with which the monsters were being engaged, I thought our chances of survival were slim.

It was heartening, at least, to see how thoroughly the SX 70 had done away with them. After being on the surface so long, I’d gotten this notion that the creatures were practically invincible simply because they were beings of mythological import. I couldn’t kill a goddamned
demon
, right? Is that even
possible
? I can say now with utter certainty that yes, you
can
blow a demon’s head off with a pulse rifle and tear it to shreds with an SX 70. They won’t get back up again. Not unless their clown king touches them. He’s the one who keeps them going, you know. The account in the ancient ship says they get weak as soon as they leave the planet’s surface, too, which explains why I was able to kill them with relative ease on the roofs of Tscharia and in the bowels of the ship. They draw power directly from the soil of their cursed planet. And as much as they must despise captivity, the land is their lifeblood. It sustains them. It gives them strength.

Rifles don’t work on all of them, of course. The red masks—also known as the Watchmen—for instance, must be higher up on the food chain, and some of the bigger, eviler ones are probably a bitch to bring down. But the demons on the ship were no worse than Kalak, which doesn’t necessarily mean they were
weak
. Far from it. Just that the playing field had been leveled, or at least minutely tilted back in my favor.

“You’d better get to the bridge,” Gallagher told me, pulling me back from my thoughts. She eyed me curiously, gently touching the swollen knuckles of my right hand. “Or maybe you should sit this one out.”

“No,” I shook my head. “They need me.” I meant for clearing out the demons, but she didn’t take it that way.

“They don’t need a navigator yet,” she said. “They just want to jump off the planet.”

I turned and started down the corridor in the opposite direction. The way the demons had come. The elevators weren’t far from there.

“Wait,” Gallagher said, jogging after me. “I’m coming, too.”

I didn’t try to stop her despite her political rank, which mandated that I lock her in a safe room until the ordeal was over. But I did stoop and grab a rifle from the corpse of a fleet soldier slouched in front of the elevator. I tried not to look at the demons too closely but it was hard to turn away. Death wasn’t much of an improvement for them, aesthetically speaking.

I pressed the call button on the lift and we waited in silence until the blast doors opened, then I stepped into the cylindrical capsule and she quickly followed.

“You forgot to check in with me before you left,” she said, eyeing the gore that covered me from head to toe. The burns on my face from alien blood must have looked hideous, but she didn’t seem repulsed. And the scars
did
heal, by the way. It just took a hell of a long time and a hell of a lot of ointment. “I could have pulled you off the surface team. You didn’t have to go through…all of that.”

I shrugged and checked the ammo register on the SX. “I don’t think it would have made a difference.” I cleared my throat and leaned back against the wall of the capsule. “Besides, if it wasn’t me, it would have been someone else. I wouldn’t want that on my conscience. I have enough already.”