Furnace (10 page)

I could practically feel the heat of her combat-breath searing the medicated gauze on the back of my neck. She was close.

Damn it damn it damn it…

I struggled to unclasp my armor plating so I could move more freely through the tight, winding corridors ahead, but it wound up slowing me down and the noise made me easier to track. I eventually gave up and just started running as fast as I could while feeling my way along the wall.

Right up until I ran face-first into a rock and dropped like Kalak bomber, that is.

The world erupted in white light momentarily and I realized that another shot had been fired behind me.

Oh no…

I didn’t feel pain right away so I figured she’d just missed me, but then the nerves in my cheeks and chest lit up like livewires and I cursed loudly. Contorting my face only made things worse, though, and I forgot all about Salib and her pulse rifle while I writhed back and forth on the wet ground.

When I opened my eyes again, I saw that the wall directly above me was smoldering from a pulse charge. The impact had saved me, then. If I’d dropped a moment later or kept running, the shot would have caught me in the back of the head and my brains would have exploded across the cave like Sillinger’s. Instead, Salib’s blast smacked the wall, and a moment later, the cave lit up again with white light.

Only this time, it hadn’t come from Salib’s rifle. It was Charlotte Rayford who’d fired. She was bleeding from a crooked nose. The right side of her face was torn to shreds and her teeth were exposed where her cheek had burned away. She looked like absolute shit, and I knew immediately that she’d been one of the troopers Sillinger pronounced a lost cause before Salib blew his head off.

I forced myself up on my left elbow for a better look.

Salib stared at me with such palpable venom in her eyes that I jerked back again, as though the intensity of her hatred alone could incinerate me. I held her gaze for a moment, frozen with indecision, and then the muscles in her face slackened and she leaned against the cave wall. Her feet gradually slipped out from under her and she hit the ground with a graceless thud that made me wince. I could hear bones and cartilage crack in her face with the extra force of the planet’s gravity on top of them. Charlotte had caught her in the back of the head, but she’d also hit the life-support controls on her suit, which must have shorted the gravity equalizers.

I watched her die, then turned to Charlotte. Her helmet light was on and glared directly into my eyes, but I could still see she only had an hour left to live at the very best. She was braced against the wall with one knee on the cave floor and her head hung down so her chin touched her chest. I gave her an inquisitive look and she shrugged half-heartedly.

“Sillinger,” she said.

I nodded and struggled to my feet. I didn’t care that she’d saved my life only to avenge Sillinger’s unjust death—I would have done the same regardless of who Salib was trying to kill—but I
did
care that she’d used her last bit of energy to do what was right…at least in my judgment. I wanted to help her if I could, but I wasn’t sure how.

“Thanks,” I said. The word felt lame rolling off of my tongue. Lonely, too. Considering the stakes, it was a poor sentiment of gratitude. I might as well have thanked her for showing up to a kegger or telling me my haircut looked nice. “What can I do?”

She didn’t answer.

I walked a few steps beyond Salib’s body, then stopped.

“Char?” I whispered, raising my hands in the universal gesture of surrender.

Her rifle was pointed at me. “Fuck off,” she said.

I stood frozen for a moment, trying to decide whether or not she really meant to shoot me. I didn’t want to make any sudden movements that could rattle her or tighten the grip of her trigger finger. I’m not stupid.

After a few seconds, her head fell against the cave wall out of sheer exhaustion. I decided to let her die in peace. Nothing I said to her, even a heartfelt expression of gratitude, would ease her passing. It could only mess things up, and maybe even get me killed.

“I’m sorry,” I told her anyway, not knowing exactly what for but knowing I owed her that much, regardless.

I made my way towards the cave entrance without another word, giving her as wide a berth as possible. I still passed within arm’s reach. She didn’t raise her rifle again, though. I don’t think she had the strength, or maybe she was already dead. Either way, I shuddered once I passed her. It had been one hell of a close call, but so had everything else on the planet so far. It was a miracle I was still alive, and I wasn’t sure it was the kind of miracle I actually wanted. I kept wavering on that front.

Stepping between the wounded soldiers at the cave entrance was much more difficult than passing the bodies of Salib, Charlotte, and Silinger, though. The remnants of Salib’s squad were still agonizingly conscious. They moaned. They reached for the unraveling strands of life with shaking fingers. A couple of them would survive, I thought, but they weren’t in any shape to hike across a hostile planet without food or water, let alone with an army of monsters stalking them.

Where did those other species come from?
I wondered distractedly. I remembered the scene around the lava, where demons forced seemingly innocent captives into fire for their amusement.

At the time, I hadn’t thought about it much because I was on the verge of death myself. Suddenly, though, the distinction seemed important. Those aliens hadn’t been Salib’s troopers or even other personnel from the
Rockne Hummel
, and we hadn’t seen any other ship during our arrival. Our systems had been malfunctioning, of course, but the likelihood that there was an active ship near enough to have its crew captured and tortured by the locals was slim, at least in my calculations.

So what did that mean? Were the other aliens locals, too? Or had they crashed like us? Was it possible that the clown demon and his minions had traveled to another planet and kidnapped them?

I didn’t care all that much for the wellbeing of those creatures (at least, not as much as myself or my fellow humans from the
Rockne Hummel
), but if alien ships had crashed or landed intact on the surface, or if the natives indeed had the capability of space travel, there were likely ships nearby that we could hijack to escape.

Don’t get ahead of yourself.

At the very least, though, it merited some consideration. If I ever made it back to the
Rockne Hummel
, I would demand that Captain Gibbons take another recon team to investigate the matter. I would lead it myself if possible, although I didn’t expect him to allow me back on the surface a third time with an enemy on the loose. I was his navigator, after all, and even with his mind on the fritz as it had been since we’d dropped out of FTL in the middle of nowhere, I’d like to think the captain knew enough not to needlessly put me in harm’s way a third time. Believe me, I don’t have a huge ego or any delusions about my self-worth, but the fact of the matter is that a ship needs a navigator and there wasn’t anyone left on board who could fill in well enough to plot our way back home.

As that thought occurred to me, I realized for the first time that there might be those among the
Hummel’s
crew that didn’t
want
to make it home. Not with any conscious resistance, but with another force working at them. It sure as hell hadn’t seemed like Salib wanted to get back to the ship and blast off of Furnace. Maybe because she’d lost most of her squad, but maybe not. The notion forced me to examine the wounded soldiers sprawled over the cave floor with more than a little suspicion.

You’ll still need all the help you can get
.

It was true. They had more weapons than I could carry on my suit and more eyes to spot the enemy. Aside from that, they were humans and my crewmates. I wasn’t about to leave them behind if I could help it.

“Come with me if you want a chance to live,” I told them.

They stopped groaning and three of the four struggled to their feet. The fourth was completely unresponsive and, like Charlotte, may have already passed on by then.

“Good,” I said. “Let’s go.”

I didn’t know where the hell I planned on taking them, but I knew we couldn’t stay in the cave any longer, if only because the decomposing bodies of Sillinger, Salib, Charlotte, and the other soldier I hadn’t identified would eventually drive us mad. Maybe even push us past the brink of self-preservation into the realm of outright lunacy.

We had to go
somewhere
. We had to do
something
.

So we stepped out of the cave back onto the killing floor.

And some of us lived to tell the tale.

MOUNTAINS

I’ll be the first to admit I wasn’t in any shape to lead the group when we set out from the cave, and yet I was still our best hope for survival. I had three soldiers with me—Aziza Mbutu, Katrina Mnatsakanov, and Brendan Flaherty—and they were all worse off than I was.

Aziza had a chunk missing from her left cheek where one of the creatures had bitten to the bone. Her eye was swollen shut, maybe even gone completely. I couldn’t tell.

The right side of Katrina’s suit had been crushed and she barely had use of her arm and leg. Her limp was slow and inefficient, but I wasn’t about to tell her to stay behind.

Brendan had it worse than any of us, though. His right arm had been severed just above the elbow. The backs of his legs were ripped to shreds, with long claw marks standing out in sickening clarity like red exclamation points. His armor plating was torn below the ribs and loose bits of flesh flapped there as he moved. I don’t know how he managed a single step while bleeding through the almost comically insufficient gauze pads Sillinger taped to him. I can only guess that whatever drugs he’d been given to cope with the pain were tiny, encapsulated miracles. Maybe Zylos? Numb-ers? I’m not sure. Either that, or the prospect of dying was just too scary for Flaherty, although that doesn’t seem to fit. He was a deep-space soldier, after all. He had to know deep down that life would only get worse for him from there. I guess it’s that same hard-coding in all of us that makes us fight to survive even when we know death is the only true release from pain.

We exited the cave about fifteen minutes after Salib killed Sillinger. At first, we stuck to the shadows along the winding mountain paths as much as we could. I heard demons screeching in the distance as we walked but didn’t risk a glance over the rocks. I didn’t know whether or not they’d stuck around the lava, but I knew stealing another look would only slow us down. Worse, it might sap the already dwindling resolve from my companions. We needed all the hope and focus at our disposal, and gazing into the eyes of utter despair isn’t conducive to either. Instead, I gripped Salib’s pulse rifle tightly and kept moving until we found a path leading to the peak.

“Stay low,” I told the others. We were on the verge of exposing ourselves to every creature within ten miles and I wanted to avoid detection as long as possible. Even with a generous head-start, I knew we still might not get very far if the monsters spotted us when we began our ascent.

Katrina nodded back at me, out of breath but not as physically or psychologically broken as I’d expected. Aziza was predictably stoic and not breathing hard at all, though that was likely because each breath stretched her torn skin and, in turn, stretched her mouth into a deeper grimace of pain.

Flaherty—also predictably—was struggling. He didn’t look like he’d make it another five feet up the mountain, let alone all the way to the peak and down the other side.

“You all right, Flaherty?” I asked.

He couldn’t even raise his head to tell me yes or no. He couldn’t even put weight on his legs anymore.

“He’s done,” Katrina told me. Aziza said nothing.

“Flaherty?” I called, a little louder this time. I wasn’t worried about being overheard. The wind and hiss of lava were plenty loud to cover my voice. I glanced back over the miles of rocky wastelands anyway. Just to be sure.

Flaherty still didn’t answer. His shoulders slumped further south and his good arm (I use that term lightly) slipped clumsily from the rock he’d used to brace himself. He fell forward in a graceless heap, unable to break his fall because his support arm had betrayed him.

“Jesus,” Katrina winced.

I leapt to him a split-second too late but still managed to catch him before major damage was done. Once I had a firm grip, I propped him against a boulder.

“Flaherty!” I shouted into his ear.

I thought about slapping him in hopes of jolting him awake, but I could tell by his complexion that it would have been useless. He was either dead or would be within five minutes. Maybe fifteen if he really fought for it. I couldn’t see why he
would
, but it wasn’t my
life.

“Leave him,” Aziza told me flatly. She’d never struck me as the emotional type, but the finality in her voice still gave me a chill. It wasn’t supposed to be easy leaving a brother or sister behind. At least, not out loud.

“There’s nothing we can do,” Katrina echoed. Her tone was a little softer but I could tell it had been manufactured to placate me. She kept anxiously eyeing the road from the lava to the mountain path.

I turned back to Flaherty and shook him, knowing the movement would domino ungodly amounts of pain through his nervous system but also knowing that pain might be my only chance of bringing him back. He didn’t stir at all, though. His eyes were half-open and his cracked, bleeding lips slung crookedly to the right. I couldn’t hear any breath, but the wind was heavy on the mountain.

So what was I supposed to do? His own squad-mates wanted to leave him behind, and maybe the fact that they
were
his squad-mates justified the abandonment. He was one of
them
, after all, and as long as
they
were the ones who made the decision that he was too injured to continue without risking the entire group, I figured it was all right to let him go. Of course, I guess there’s always the possibility that he was just an asshole and they weren’t broken up over the prospect of his death. But considering they’d just lost the rest of their squad including their commanding officer, I’m sure they were a little desensitized, and that was probably the overriding emotion (or lack thereof) that allowed them to cut the cord. It made the grief a little easier to swallow.

Regardless, I agreed with their assessment. There was no way Flaherty would make it up the mountain, and the chances we’d be spotted during our ascent were significantly higher if he did because we’d have to help him the whole way up. Besides, he was probably dead already, right? I don’t know for sure. I would have needed to disengage a significant amount of armor-plating on him to verify beyond the shadow of a doubt, and I didn’t have that kind of time.
We
didn’t.

Truth be told, I didn’t want to know if he was alive, anyway. It only would have made things more difficult if he was. At least now I can comfort myself by assuring everyone around me that Flaherty had already passed by the time we left him. Usually, that’s enough to assuage my guilt. Sometimes, it’s not.

I rose and took two steps away from him, swallowing back cotton-mouth and checking to be sure the pulse rifle’s safety was disengaged.

“Wait,” Aziza said, gripping my wrist. “Don’t shoot him. They’ll see it.” She nodded down to the lava lakes and I followed her gaze. The monsters were little more than hulking, abnormal shadows in the distance and so were their victims, but her point was well taken. If the purpose of leaving Flaherty’s body behind was to avoid detection by the creatures, it was stupid to fire a pulse rifle unless absolutely necessary. A pulse charge would be visible—and perhaps audible—from several miles away on a bad day, even if it was filtered by trees and battle smoke. On a clear mountain landscape, however, we would be found the moment the shot was fired.

It was also a waste of ammo, but none of us chose to point that out even though I’m fairly certain we were all thinking it. It’s how they train us in the fleet, especially soldiers like us who are accustomed to battle and deep space excursions. When you’re cut off from the rest of humanity, every resource is precious. Especially bullets and pulse charges.

I switched the safety back on the pulse rifle and sighed. “All right,” I said. “Let’s get the fuck out of here then.”

Over the years I’ve been an active fleet soldier both in the infantry and as a navigator, I’ve had to leave a lot of brothers behind. A few hours earlier, I’d left Chara to die. Hell, I’d let Sillinger and Rayford die for saving my life, and I’d watched Salib die while trying to kill me.

But for some reason, Flaherty’s death hurt the worst. I think because it was the first time I’d
knowingly
left someone when it wasn’t their request and when his fate was far worse than a normal passing. If the creatures discovered him out there and he had even one breath left in him, he would suffer. Not for an hour or a few years, but forever. Whenever I reflect on the ways that Furnace broke me (which is often indeed), I think that particular fracture was the most profound. It was the
change
that it sparked. The subtle shift in me which completely altered my self-worth. Suddenly, I knew I was capable not just of leaving a soldier behind, but of deciding to prolong his misery for the sake of conserving ammunition. A single goddamned pulse charge, which didn’t wind up doing me any good anyway.

That’s the kind of shit that messes you up for good.

“What’s the plan, sir?” Katrina asked.

I shrugged and strapped the pulse rifle to the holster on my back. I needed both hands to negotiate the terrain. “We hope to God we find the
Hummel
before we die of thirst.” I paused, thinking about the clown demon stalking me across the wastelands. “Or something else.”

Aziza groaned with effort as she followed. Katrina fell silent for a while, which I’d gathered was rare for her from our brief conversations during boarding protocols at Serenity Base.

The mountain wasn’t particularly tall as mountains go, but it felt like an eighty-five degree slope as we scaled it. The gravity-equalizers on our suits were starting to malfunction as our energy sources ran dry, too. For a trio of wounded strangers in a strange land with nothing left in the tank, it made for one hell of a climb. I didn’t look back to check on Katrina or Aziza at all, mostly because my arms were trembling and I thought I’d lose my grip if I was startled even momentarily by the view behind me. But I heard how much they suffered along the way. There was no shortage of grunts, moans, curses, yelps, or cascading rocks in my wake, and I’m pretty sure they both stopped to rest at least twice while I continued on without them.

Yet somehow, roughly an hour later, the three of us were within reach of the summit and none of us had sustained further injury (excepting, of course, the sheer exhaustion of climbing a mountain while recuperating from life-threatening wounds). It wasn’t until we reached the top that I realized I hadn’t expected all of us to make it after leaving Flaherty to rot on the killing floor. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I’d figured that at
least
Katrina would have phoned it in before we reached the halfway point. Let alone the summit. It wasn’t over yet, though. We still had to make it down the other side without incident, but I had no doubt we could manage now that we’d gotten through the hard part (or so I thought).

I sat down a few feet from the mountaintop and turned back to them.

“Do you remember how far the ship is from here?”

Aziza touched her cheek gingerly and winced. The blood beneath her eye had begun to coagulate in a strange cluster with yellowish-gray fluid. It looked rife with infection. I tried not to let my revulsion show, but I still nearly vomited the meager contents of my stomach at the sight.

“I have no fucking idea where the ship is,” she said. “I thought
you
did. Wasn’t that the whole point of climbing here?”

Katrina grabbed the last handgrip before the peak and gasped. “Stop,” she said between gulps of air.

I didn’t know what she was referring to but I felt awful seeing her struggle so badly while I perched above them and effectively blocked them both from proceeding.

“Relax,” I told Aziza. “We’ll figure it out. It’s better up here than what we would have had to face back there.” I nodded toward the lava lakes and the endless wastelands beyond them. “I’ve already been out that way. We’d all be dead before we found food or water.”

“Still might be,” Aziza muttered.

“Maybe,” I said. “But at least there’s hope.”

Even Aziza couldn’t argue that point. Not until we looked over the other side of the mountain, anyway, and saw what fresh horrors awaited us.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Aziza scoffed. She was exhausted to the point of delirium. I could see the ghost of a smile rising on her lips, and that was plenty bizarre for the situation. It was Katrina’s response that really caught me off guard, though, and I’m not sure why. As soon as she saw the fields of corpses below us and the abominations prowling the dull, moss-green and cadaver-gray landscape, she dropped to her knees in prayer.

Aziza collapsed backward so violently that I thought she’d fainted initially, right up until she scoffed and shook her head at Katrina. “That won’t help us,” she said. “
He
doesn’t live here.
They
live here.”

“Shut up,” I snapped, more because I felt a need to lash out than I actually cared about protecting Katrina’s religious freedoms. “It sure as hell won’t hurt anyone.” I glanced at Katrina, trying to avoid glimpsing the land ahead of us until I came up with an alternate escape plan. Her prayer was old Russian, a dialect I figured must have pre-dated Standard by at least a milennium.

“We’re fucked,” Aziza said.

Katrina finished praying and we sat in silence for a while with downcast eyes, intent on ignoring our predicament.