Baptismal Fires
Baptismal Firesby Jeremy Lee
When she opened
her eyes nothing felt right, and she felt itchy all over, as if her skin tried
escaping from the stupidity her life became even if her
bones insisted on staying and seeing things through to the end. Shannon rolled out of her bunk, planting her
feet on the deck and staggering over to the overly exposed head at the far end
of the quarters. The first time she
ducked in for a shower, feeling like the entire crew watched her stripping
down; Shannon felt a vivid flashback to physical education in her boarding
school and subjecting to the test of puberty again in adulthood felt
absurd. Nothing ever felt right out in
the black, and she missed fresh air almost as much as she missed easily
identifiable food. In the television
programs she remembered all the windows looking out on the endless star field,
but since signing up to do her four years and get a free college education she
felt certain she’d seen fewer stars than living in the polluted center of London.
The heavy
rocking underfoot signaled the maneuvering thruster humming to life, which made
not only Shannon Drake’s but also all the sleepy eyes aboard the Dreadnaught snap open. The claxons roared a heartbeat later,
deafening, and Shannon veered away from the toilet and back towards her bunk in
the middle of the crew’s berth, sliding into her uniform’s jacket. Captain Wellesley threw so many drills at his
crew, at every hour of the day and night, the warning bells induced boredom
more than anxiety.
“All hands beat
to quarters,” Wellesley’s sedate baritone droned through the ship’s com network,
the voice of their god and commander pounding in the crew’s skulls. Then, with all the air of an afterthought,
the captain’s voice repeated with an addendum, “Beat to quarters, this is not a
drill.”
Shannon,
despite all the practices, lectures, and training exercises, felt a flood of
fear. She didn’t belong out here, didn’t
want to die out in the frozen wasteland of space or burn up in the emerging
ozone of the red planet they orbited.
She just wanted the company to pay for school, spend a few years in
uniform, pop off a few rounds, maybe take in the gas giants and try spotting
Clark’s monolith, and then graduate to a suit and tie gig with the company,
moving from the martial to the home décor departments, designing custom
furniture for one of the boutique lines.
Flinging her
weight bodily out of the crew’s berth, not trusting legs to keep working of
their own volition, and nearly taking out one of her crewmates, Shannon numbly
stumbled into the corridor.
“Watch it
Drake,” Doyle barked while shoving Shannon back against the bulkhead. “Just run and hide in the head and stay the
hell out of the way.”
Swallowing,
thinking of taking Doyle’s advice, Shannon instead chased after him, stepping
into the control room and instantly regretting her temerity. She shouldn’t have been there, her place was
below in the plasma bays, keeping ammunition moving, and she froze in the
middle of the con’s bustling activity. The
con undulated with chaotic activity, but all of the pandemonium filtered
through two men, the CO and the COB, and then passed back outward from them to
the men and women manning their stations.
Pressing against the environmental controls, hearing the captain and the
chief of the boat’s commands through a fog, Shannon couldn’t turn and flee. The metal and flashing electronic screens all
around her created a bland and lifeless picture of industry, but the screams,
and the throbbing through the deck spoke of war and not commerce.
Bangs and
shimmies sent the Dreadnaught
spinning, explosions popping and bursting all over the ship, devouring
spacecraft and crew. Shannon saw an
empty chair in front of her and slid down, staring at the controls in front of
her without knowing what to do, not even grasping what station she sat at. Her fingers flighted over several touchscreen
buttons, almost pressing half a dozen, and the cacophony around her dulled into
a catatonic hum.
“It’s a good
try,” Captain Wellesley barked in her ear, pulling the enlisted girl from her
seat with a vice-grip on Shannon’s shoulder.
“Get to your lifeboats now. All
hands,” he screamed but his voice boomed out of the handful of still-functioning
speakers all over the Dreadnaught,
“abandon ship.”
The captain
kept hold of Shannon, directing her through the rapidly disintegrating ship,
Doyle and the other survivors from the con right in front of her, and then
Wellesley began kicking crewmen into lifeboats as the ship groaned, the metal
giving way and ready to invite in the vacuum of space. Shannon belatedly thought of yelling,
slamming her fist against the shut and locked hatch, feeling the pod ejecting
away from the ship. The sounds around
her vanished and she sank back absorbed in the absolute silence of space. Then the dull roar began as a rumble through
the metal of the small craft, spiking and climbing in sound along with the
temperature. Sweating, praying the
shield beneath her held, and the atmosphere proved thick enough to catch in the
chutes, Shannon waited through reentry, screaming the entire time but not even
realizing how loudly she wailed. The
heat of the atmosphere resisting the small Mercury-craft like pod climbed, the
feeling of free-fall sinking in Shannon’s stomach, and then jerked with the
sudden rush of the parachutes, gathering in as much atmosphere as they could, and
by the time she jarred and bounced across the Martian landscape nothing broke
through her numbed shock.
In the
seclusion of her lifeboat, without a window or even hardly room to move, she’d
lost all track of time or even conscious thought. On the ground, without the constant assault
on her senses reentry provided, Shannon thought of what awaited her, she’d
survived the attack on the ship, and plunging down through the planet’s
atmosphere, just to land on Martian soil, lost on the great red rock. The door began popping and decompressing, sending
the enlisted girl pressing back away from the hatch, then opened with pneumatic
hisses.
“No, no, no,
please god, no,” Shannon screamed, flinching her hands in a useless echo of
duck and cover.
“Quiet now
crewman,” Wellesley snapped. She focused
closer at the sound, his voice coming through the face-shield of an EVAC suit
with a slight metallic ting. “You’ll be
fine, this far into the politician’s terraforming gimmick you can breathe on
the surface fifteen or twenty minutes before the poison’s too deep in your
lungs.”
“Right,”
Shannon tried climbing out of the pod and fell on the Martian landscape. She blushed, but then her dark skin rippled
with goose bumps when she felt the frigid air, and nearly chocked when the
iciness flashed through her lungs. “I
just forgot a minute, but I remember now.”
She already felt a scratching in her throat, lightheaded dizziness
swimming in front of her eyes, and the chilled sensation multiplied with every
breath.
“Just don’t
waste any more time getting your gear strapped on.” The captain popped the service hatch and
gestured vaguely inside with his hand. He
observed the red planet, not quite as pure in color as he remembered from his
own first tour, back when the first colonists hadn’t even reached the asteroid
belt yet and Mars still stood as the extreme edge of human civilization. A few browns and tans hinted among the rust
colored crags, lichen clung to the sides of boulders, and he thought he even
spotted a few shrubs in the far distance.
In another generation or two cows might be grazing on this very spot,
the idea revolted the captain who preferred space hostile and remote. “We’re probably not more than twenty miles
from Von Braun, but we’re already short of time.”
“We’ll have to
leave Drake behind if you want to cover that distance any quicker than a week,”
Doyle snickered. The other survivors,
after picking over the crashed pods which took hits in space and smashed down
with nothing living left inside, sat around watching the newbie struggle with
her suit. All forty pods made it down,
but only twenty-eight members of the crew stood around on the red soil.
“Nobody gets
left Doyle.” Wellesley fixed the man
with a gaze speaking louder than words, “You were even worse on your first tour,
in case you’ve forgotten.”
They started
out across the harsh red land, two abreast and moving their feet double-time. Shannon sweated profusely with ten strides, the
suit more than her skinny frame could take, but stayed right beside the captain
at the head of the column no matter how much pain shot through her system. They all heard the sound, though only Shannon
glanced around and saw the rounds hurtling down towards them. The cannon shots, the term borrowed from the
ancient weapons they bore only a passing resemblance to, hurled bundled plasma
down from low orbit. The attacking
Coalition ship which took out the Dreadnaught
clearly wanted to finish her crew, ensuring a clear and open path for their
landing commandos to Von Braun, so they lobbed down shots meant for massive
craft in space to plow the road and finish whatever remained of the escaping
Alliance crew.
Breaking into a
mad dash the pairs in the marching column scattered, only vaguely and
erratically holding their course for Von Braun.
New craters exploded in the Martian landscape, and the temperature
boiled as the plasma charged the air.
Shannon nearly froze, only the sight of the captain running a straight
course out across the plain kept her legs churning, feeling a desperate need
for Wellesley at her side. Unlike her
comrades, who tried running serpentine patterns, Drake followed Wellesley’s example
and ran pell-mell for the far ridge, the only landmark within sight.
She sprang up
the rust colored rocks of the ridge and found the captain standing still. “Sir, we can’t stop here.”
“Open your eyes
and ears crewman, they’re not risking any shots this close to the colony.” Wellesley nodded with his helmet and drew
Drake’s eyes out across the last stretch of red earth running out from the
ridge, which hid the greatest manmade structure on Mars from view. “Some of the underground equipment reaches
out this far, and you never know what a little damage might do.”
“Aye,” Shannon
mumbled, taking in the sight of Von Braun Colony. More than forty-square miles comprised of
small interlocking modules with multiple greenhouse domes, and just outside several
of the largest compartments growing garden parks which signaled the steady
changing of the Martian air. “What’s
stopping them from blowing it off the map?”
“That’s far and
away the best prize in the system this side of Armstrong; they aren’t trying to
blow Von Braun into holy oblivion. What
they want is to take the city. Whoever
controls that colony just took the lion’s share of the trade off the belt, and
that’s billions in revenue, if not more than that with the rate the mines are
coming on line.”
By then a few
of the remaining soldiers of the Dreadnaught,
only five others surviving the gambit through the plasma shot, joined Drake and
Wellesley up on the ridge. Something
made Shannon refuse turning back, not wanting to see the field full of charged
holes blasted from space, and she kept her back ridged and faced the
colony. Doyle and the others swallowed
at the sight of the city, and stumbled onward without even acknowledging the
captain.
Wellesley let
them walk, letting the shock and terror settle and pass, walking with Drake at
the back of the group. As they drew
close to the modular compound, gradually re-adhering to training and moving in
secrecy they approached the glass dome of a massive four square mile greenhouse
large enough for redwoods inside, and a vast variety of exotic flora and
fauna. The captain again sprang to the
front of the group and guided them up the service ladder towards the top of the
great dome.
Peering through
the glass while the others began filing into the airlock, eight stories above
the red earth, Shannon thought she saw armed men jogging through the trees
inside. Pressing closer to the glass,
she caught a second glimpse, and recognized the dull gray uniforms of the
Coalition troops. Her mind shot in a
hundred directions of comprehension, remembering what the captain told her on
the ridge, wanting to shout, but also feeling a need to stop the men below
before anything else happened.
“Drake, get in
here, it’ll take nearly an hour to get inside,” Doyle hollered down with
another snarl of exasperation. More than
anything, he wished a few of the more worthy soldiers made it through, and
couldn’t believe a fool like Drake survived what better men couldn’t.
“They’re
already here,” Drake answered. She
pulled her sidearm and sprang up the steps of the ladder into the airlock. Ignoring the shouts and protests of the rest,
she shot the controls and broke down the door leading inside, breaking the
airlock and letting the Martian air rush inside.
Drake leapt
blindly from the eight-story high perch, cushioned slightly by the thicker air
rushing out of the massive greenhouse into the thin space outside. She bounced between a few trees, rolling
painfully to her feet and limping in the direction she saw the Coalition
invasion teams sneaking. Her leg sent an
explosion of pain coursing through her with every step, and she realized dully
that the bone probably broke in the fall, but she couldn’t let that stop her
now. The face-shield of her suit cracked,
and she could hear the hiss of oxygen bleeding out, but she clung to the
captain’s reminder that she should have a few minutes, and kept hobbling
forward. Drake didn’t know if Wellesley
and the others were behind her, or moving out on the catwalks from the high
airlock perch, and she didn’t care. She
set off through the paradise which gardeners and botanists created from the plants
of the earth, an Eden for Mars, and didn’t even think about the way her white
EVAC suit stood out among the greens of the forest.
Of the twenty
commandos whom Drake spotted from outside, she now found only six, struggling
on towards the door leading into the interior modules of Von Braun, already
showing signs of weakness from poisonous air.
Drake took careful aim, though she hadn’t practiced firing in her EVAC
suit. Her first shot caught one of them,
tearing his chest open and sending him sprawling to the ground. The rest of the Coalition troops turned
around quickly, gasping for air and off-guard at finding a sniper waiting for
them, and each breath dragging them further under, but they sent out a spray of
bullets at Drake who could only fumble and pop off a few more rounds.
Drake felt
sharp pains ripping through her body, staggering forward squeezing the trigger
relentlessly even when the muzzle quit flashing. Drake tried counting how many of them went
down, but couldn’t concentrate through the searing pain flashing in every joint
of her body. Breathing hurt, a
scratching sensation rising up in her throat clawed her insides deeper with
every inhale and exhale.
Bodies moved
around her, and Drake realized she must have collapsed at some point, only
seeing the shapes as specters of black on blue, but they slowly took on
concrete form with other shades blending in.
Wellesley appeared over her, easing her helmet off and his severe face
almost breaking into a blank expression, which all his crew called a Wellesley
Smile. “Stay calm, you did good kiddo,
they didn’t even make it out of here into the colony proper.”
“I was going to
design furniture, who’d have thought there was something else out there.”
The end
If you would like to find out what happens next check out New Frontier from Neverland Publishing.
