Furnace (25 page)

Teemo whistled. “So long, assholes.”

I’d never seen such a huge pulse blast before from such close range. No wonder Lao Gang had taken so long arming the blast and picking his target. I think he probably had a better idea than the rest of us how big the explosion would be and wanted to make sure we were at a safe distance before detonation.

“We’re gaining altitude. Should be out in open space within two minutes,” Teemo said.

I checked the readings again even though I knew he was right. It gave me something to do other than stare at the explosion and think of all the fallen soldiers we’d left behind. Not just dead, but sentenced to a hundred thousand years of torture. If I’d realized that was the reality back when they’d died, I never would have left their bodies. Not that I could have done much, of course. I was in bad shape. I’d barely made it back to the ship, and it had taken more than a miracle to get there. Worst of all, I’d indebted myself to the clown king in the process.

Sold my soul to the Devil
, I thought sourly.

I’d never thought I’d use the phrase literally.

Wherever you go, I will find you.

His face kept appearing in my head, even as the pulse blast swept out from Tscharia and blanketed the surface in dust and fire as far as the eye could see.

He’s gone
, I told myself.

I wasn’t so sure, though. How can you kill the Devil? How can you kill evil itself?

“Brace yourselves,” Teemo said. “This is going to be a rough one.”

I strapped into my seat and closed my eyes.

Please, God, get us home
, I prayed as the ship rattled around me. The shields hadn’t been fully repaired after we crashed. There simply hadn’t been enough time or resources to finish everything that needed work, so Rosie’s team had focused on getting them strong enough to withstand space and a turbulent departure, but we wouldn’t be able to land anywhere until we patched the rest of it. Apparently, all but two of her team members had been killed as the first wave of demons swept through the ship.

“Hang on,” Teemo shouted over the howling atmosphere. “Almost through.”

“Break orbit and cloak immediately!” Gallagher yelled.

I understood the sentiment, but she hadn’t met the clown king. Cloaking the ship would mean jack-shit with him. He didn’t use sensors to locate his prey. At least, not the kind that could be tricked by a rudimentary cloaking device designed specifically to pass beneath the scans of Kalak warships.

As we broke orbit and shot into space, I opened my eyes and stared with wild relief at the black expanse.

Please, God
, I prayed again.
Please, get me home.

“We’re clear,” Teemo announced with a heavy sigh. He slunk back into his chair and wiped sweat from his brow.

Tears formed in my eyes and I fought them back, embarrassed. I didn’t know if it would last long, but for that moment, I was free.

Free
, I thought, unstrapping my safety harness and stumbling toward the elevator, not paying any attention to Rosie or Gallagher as they held out their arms with concern.

“Let us help you,” Rosie said.

I shooed her away. “I’m fine.” I’ve never lied so deeply in my life.

“Where to?” Teemo asked.

Gallagher helped me into the elevator despite my protests. “We wait a while,” she said. “Lieutenant Chalmers needs medical attention.”

I limped into the elevator and pressed the button for Deck Three and my personal quarters. Gallagher watched me carefully, likely debating whether or not she should accompany me. “I’m going to go sleep for a couple weeks,” I told her.

She grinned weakly. “Good. I’ll send a doctor if any of them are still alive.”

I didn’t think they were, and at least two of the three didn’t have medical expertise any greater than the field training the rest of us had in Basic, but I didn’t feel like explaining that to her. “Yes, sir,” I said instead.

The elevator door closed and I collapsed against the far wall as the decks dinged by.

Free
, I thought.

Wherever you go, I will find you.

I didn’t make it to my room. When the doors opened on Deck Three, I simply crawled out to the common area and slept on the warm steel for a long, long time.

While I slept, the Devil worked his dark magic again. He wasn’t done with us yet.

RETURN

I wasn’t awake when it happened so I can’t necessarily confirm that the clown king of Tscharia was the one who transported the
Rockne Hummel
back to the point in the Milky Way from which he’d extracted us. But as a navigator and someone who’s had firsthand experience with his transportation magic on two separate occasions (entering the wastelands and arriving in the bowels of the
Hummel
just in time for takeoff), I can tell you it is the only reasonable (ha!) explanation. Either way, we suddenly appeared right where we’d initially lost contact with fleet command like nothing had happened. The only difference was that our ship was pointed in the opposite direction.

Back towards home.

Once I realized we were back where we’d started, I wondered fleetingly if it had all been a dream. A grotesque nightmare birthed by the combined evils of the so-called ‘Visions of Parin’ (space madness) and the chemicals involved in the hyper-sleep stasis pods. That would have been a convenient explanation both for us and the fleet, but physical evidence of our time on Furnace is everywhere. The most glaring corroboratory items are corpses of alien species that don’t exist in the fleet database, of course, but our ship’s log shows that we traveled an impossible number of light years. Utterly impossible. Something in the duocentillions. Perhaps into another universe altogether. All we can do is shake our heads and accept it.

In all, twenty of us survived. Myself, Teemo, Gallagher, Rosie, Captain Gibbons, Martavius the Cook, Lao Gang, two of the doctors, and eleven other personnel members I’d never had contact with prior to the voyage home. Nearly all the officers made it. All except Salib. That’s the shit of it, I guess. There’s no reason why the higher-ranking officers should have made it instead of the grunt workers. No
rational
explanation, anyway. Especially for Teemo and me, who were both on the surface for hours.

I do have a theory, though. I think there’s a reason the pilot, navigator, master gunner, Crown Representative, chief engineer, and doctors survived. I think the clown king
wanted
us to. I think he picked
us
specifically because he knew we were the ones who could get the ship back home. Back to Earth.

I think he had a plan.

The question was raised whether or not we should attempt to complete our diplomatic mission, but there was no real debate. Even Representative Gallagher had to admit that it was foolish to even consider such a thing given the heavy losses we’d sustained. Besides, we needed extensive repairs on the ship before we could land and we were already way behind schedule for pickup. That’s to say nothing of the message we’d be sending disparaged colonists by extracting a high-ranking Crown politician in our beat-up vessel.

Instead, I plotted a course for Pluto Station and we roamed the ship restlessly for days, trying not to think too much about what had happened or the soldiers we’d left behind. Teemo and I cleaned up the bodies the best we could, just so we wouldn’t have to pass them every time we performed systems checks in the lower decks or got up in the middle of the night for a snack from the mess hall. It didn’t erase the bad memories—far from it—but it spaced them out so we could at least breathe a little without remembering.

Despite my reservations, one of the doctors patched me up pretty well. My wounds were mostly superficial, after all, and were cured with ointment, dermal regeneration, and a whole lot of rest. By the time we reached the research labs on Pluto, I was almost good as new.

Captain Gibbons, however, is another story. I didn’t catch all the details because the crew is still being questioned about the events that transpired on the
Rockne Hummel
while I was on the surface, but the gist of it is that things were a lot tenser between Gibbons and Gallagher than I’d realized. More to the point, Gibbons was a lot closer to the edge than I’d suspected. They say that career astronauts often snap when they’ve spent too much time in the void, but I guess I hadn’t known the captain was capable of falling into the deep end until just before he sent me out on the ground mission. Even then, I’d thought he was just a little (understandably) tense given the nature of the situation.

Gibbons hadn’t just snapped, though. He’d gone bat-shit crazy.

He started the massacre aboard the
Hummel
by turning a pulse rifle on his own soldiers, and finished by using a fire ax and his bare hands. In all, he was responsible for the deaths of twenty-four crewmembers aboard the ship, and if you add the ones from Salib’s squad who he sent to their deaths on a fool’s errand, that number just about doubles. There are also reports that he purposely damaged a significant number of key systems upon our arrival on Furnace, making Rosie’s job much more difficult than it had to be. Which, I guess, is fortunate for me. If Rosie had gotten the systems up and running even ten minutes sooner, I would have been stranded on the planet.

I shudder to think what it would have been like to be stuck there forever. I dream about it almost every night. Whenever I’m able to fall asleep.

Eventually, Gallagher had enlisted the help of Rosie, Lao Gang, and several other soldiers to sedate Captain Gibbons, at which point he was locked in the brig and wasn’t released until the Patrol ship Pluto Station sent to intercept us docked and escorted him to another cell. I’m sure there’s one hell of a dark and harrowing story there, but like I said, the members of the crew with information pertaining to Captain Gibbons’ mental collapse and subsequent killing spree haven’t been released from fleet headquarters. Maybe Gallagher will tell me about it sometime. Maybe it will help ease her guilt, if she carries any. She doesn’t exactly strike me as the guilt-bearing type, but people surprise you sometimes.

I guess it’s really her story to tell, anyway. Or his. Maybe one of them will share the details with the committee the same way I have. A detailed written account. It should save me from repetitive questions going forward (I hope), and it’s certainly helped to get the ordeal off my chest. I guess we’ll find out eventually if one of them chooses to do the same, although I don’t know that it’s in the best interest of the public to leak details about Furnace.

By the way, Gallagher’s the one who started calling it ‘Furnace’ after I explained the history of the planet and its inhabitants. The name seems to fit well enough. Not
Hell
, exactly, because it has a unique place separate from the religious mythology on our home planet. Furnace, where everything burns.

I’ve kept my mouth shut for the most part, even when my mother asks why I’ve suddenly been granted six months of paid leave. It’s important to keep it secret, at least for a while. We might never get another colony established if people feel they need to worry about getting sucked into Hell itself on top of all the other dangers involved with a deep space mission and settling a terra-formed planet. Besides, if I breathed a word about any of this, I’m sure the Crown would have soldiers dragging me to a Psychiatric Convalescence center within hours, or a penal colony on another godforsaken rock. Probably on the moons of Jupiter. Maybe Haley Penn, otherwise known as the Pit.

I still can’t sleep at night, and it’s not just the nightmares of what I’ve seen that haunts me. Since passing out during our escape from Furnace—a rest better described as an exhaustion-induced coma than a normal sleep cycle—I lie awake every night, staring at the ceiling and reflecting on how I screwed up the whole mission. How I’m responsible for the loss of so many lives. Good people, all of them. In their own ways.

I can blame Captain Gibbons for killing members of his own crew and for insisting Salib’s squad return to the surface even after we’d agreed repairing the engines was our number one priority. The truth is, though, Gibbons is another casualty on my conscience. If it hadn’t been for my goddamned course alteration, he wouldn’t be locked away facing twenty-four counts of second-degree murder, along with the fleet’s in-house disciplinary measures for the laundry list of protocols he broke along the way.

Without that one course alteration, all his suffering could have been avoided.

In the end, you see, it all comes back to me, no matter how vehemently everyone exonerates me.

And it tears me apart.

The depression comes and goes, but when it arrives, it’s absolutely paralyzing. I think long and hard about suicide. Sometimes I even get to the point where the VP barrel is pressed against my temple, and I swear I’m about to pull the trigger. No note, no apologies, nothing. Just darkness. Nothingness. Sweet relief.

But then I think of all the times I could have ended it on Furnace and didn’t. I think about all the soldiers suffering in Tscharia and how trivializing their unending deaths by voluntarily ending my own life is a slap in the face to them.
I
made it, after all. I’m a survivor of the
Rockne Hummel
. And if I
kill myself after surviving impossible odds on the Hell planet, then what was the point of all their sacrifices? Of Katrina standing up to the Watchman in the corpse fields? Of Sillinger being killed by his commanding officer for saving my life?

I think of all that, and the depression only gets worse. Because I’m ashamed.

And so, I choose to keep living. Not for myself, but for the memories of those I left behind. I guess spite fuels the choice a little, as well. Knowing that every breath I take represents a crushing defeat for the demons on Furnace. My existence is their failure, and it makes me smile to think how it would enrage them to see me walking through the soft grass of my home planet, almost completely healed from the injuries they inflicted upon me.

It’s still a part of me, though.
He
is still a part of me. The clown king of Tscharia. A horned demon exiled from this galaxy by a mysterious deity who may very well be the Judeo-Christian God, or maybe not. I guess in any war, we bring back the evil that’s touched us. It just runs a little deeper after a place like Furnace. It’s harder to root out.

He talks to me at night, you know.

He takes the form of my mother’s severed head. Sometimes I wake and the gristle from her neck has smeared red over my chest. Sometimes she’s resting on the windowsill, watching me with vacant eyes and a grin that’s too wide for her mouth. Sometimes she’s on my dresser or in my closet or speaking to me from the hallway.

Wherever you go
, he tells me through her mouth.
I will find you.

It terrifies me. But the worst part of all is feeling that he’s telling the truth. He
wanted
us to leave, after all. He selected each survivor specifically, based on our roles in the ship’s crew. I have no doubt about that. Lao to protect us, Teemo to fly us home, Rosie to fix the engines and life-support systems, the doctors to patch us up and discover which alien corpses were edible for humans on the way back when our food-stores ran out (I’m not proud of that, but our communications systems were extremely short range and we couldn’t have landed on an alien planet for trade even if there’d been one nearby), Gallagher to command the ship once the captain was unfit for duty, Marty to prepare the food, and me to do the navigation that would lead us back to friendly space once we were in the Milky Way. I can’t guess what the other eleven soldiers stuck around for. Maybe just some extra muscle in case of trouble along the way. Regardless, I know it was all part of his plan.

And in the cold, lonely hours of the night, I know
why,
too.

Because he came back with us. He used us as vessels to return to the planet from which he’d been exiled. After all those eons without catching a reliable human ship, he’d finally gotten lucky and seized the opportunity. And soon, he will break free.

Wherever you go, I will find you
, my mother’s head tells me.

So I lock my door at night and dread the day he comes knocking.

Tscharia
, she tells me.

Her shrill voice stops my heart, and sometimes I call her in the small hours of the morning just to make sure it wasn’t really
her
visiting me as the Devil’s mouthpiece. She’s always happy to hear from me, and always invites me back to visit the shores of Lake Huron and relive the days of my youth with the rest of my family. The sound of her actual voice always makes me feel better. It makes me feel at home.

But I know someday, she’ll answer the phone and start chanting, “Here…here…here…” in that monotonous drawl of the undead.

That’s how I’ll know I’m fucked.

END

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