Hey CW, wrote a Doom inspired short story. Here's part I.
Lmk what you think?
Feel free to contribute anything you've written as well!
In the depths on the firmament of outer space, in the smallest corners of the unknown, in a place where no light ever touches: a fire ignited. Through this fire traveled the whispers and bitter curses from poor damned souls who will never taste of the mercy of death.
Their whispers are audible, even in the vacuum. For their wails exist in that plane which transcends space and time. The voices travel through infinite blackness taking the form of a cloud of sulfur. After eons of searching, it envelops the first planetary body it deems fit for its survival in a coil of cosmic dust. Its journey has finally ended; man-kinds had just begun.
[2437 A.D]
Aboard a small space exploration vessel drifting slowly along the edge of the universe, a young officer stirred in his sleep. He dreams of a firestorm. He can see himself, standing at the center of the universe. A flame consumes everything in sight, even the emptiness of space is set ablaze, heat consumes him. All is black, his vision is gone as there is nothing in the universe left to see. He can hear his flesh crackling, charring and the smell of burnt hair pierces his nostrils. The crackling becomes rhythmic; he feels as though he has been burning an eternity. The crackling grew louder.
“Captain Florence.” Even louder still. “Captain Florence?”
His eyes opened to a banging on his cabin door. He shot up from his bed glazed in sweat. The air was thick all around him.
“Come in.” He said, rubbing his eyelids.
“Captain, it’s urgent!” A voice called from beyond his quarters, muffled and agitated.
“It’s open.”
The door only shuffled statically from side to side.
“Captain, are you alright?”
Florence roused from his bed to face the door. He reached for the lock but immediately pulled back when his hand was stung by the heat of the handle. Still in a daze, he staggered to his knees.
“Over-ride the lock, Jackson.” Nothing happened.
“Over-ride the lock, Lieutenant!” He yelled, still unsure if he had been heard beyond the door and unsure whether he was still in his dream. The rhythmic pressing of a key-pad was faintly heard. Suddenly, the door slid open. Light flashed into the room revealing Lt. Jackson’s silhouette, obscuring his face.
“Sir, are you alright?”
“I’m fine. What’s going on?”
“Captain, we found it.” The air was silent for a minute.
“Tell the whole crew to report to the deck in half an hour. And get Knope up here, tell him my temperature regulator is malfunctioning. It’s hot as hell in here.”
Florence washed his face, dressed then rode the central elevator down to the medical bay. Through a window behind him he stared out into the vast expanse, almost certain he was awake. His dreams of late had been quite intense but now space looked placid and immovable, as it always did when he made his daily rounds about the ship. During the slow elevator ride he thought about his dreams and the burn on his palm, about what Jackson had said. The transmission had been found and for the first time in his life; Florence was unsure how to proceed.
The elevator door opened to a dimly lit hallway with its path marked by small flashing green lights on the ceiling. The dull click of his boots against the iron floor echoed down the hallway until it was lost in the black ends of the ship. Apart from the humming of the engines, it was all Florence could hear this far down below deck. While walking he noticed his bootlace untied. He paused for a moment and knelt. When he arose, he noticed something peculiar. His feet stopped but the echo continued, it seemed to have bounced back. He heard a step coming toward him. And then another step. And another. Until it was no longer an echo he called out,
“Karen?”
He called out again.
“Karen is that you?”
Only more steps replied.
Then, suddenly, a figure took form in the darkness ahead of him. It swayed from side to side as it crept forth, to the rhythm of its steps. Finally, the figure emerged from the darkness and there came to light a woman.
“Good morning, Captain.” She said to her friend, removing a pair of black shells from her ears.
“Garza, how many times have I told you not to work with shells on?”
“Someone’s jumpy this morning.”
“I’m not jumpy. Why hasn’t Knope fixed the light fixtures down here?”
“I think he said something about going up top to work on someone’s temperature regulator.”
Florence sighed.
“You think you could patch this up for me?” He stretched out his right hand. In the middle of his palm was a rectangular sear. It wasn’t hard pressed but the outline of it had turned white, giving Garza the impression it was of a second degree.
“Ouch!” she exclaimed, “Come on down to my office, Captain. I’ll patch you up.”
They walked a short distance to the end of the hall. Keeping a slack pace, he let her lead the way. Only so that he might admire the way she walked. When it was made known to him that Karen Garza was without a squad to medic, he personally requested her service aboard his ship.
The medical bay was a small room, outfitted like a clinic. Florence sat on a cushioned seat wrapped in noisy paper. Karen sat at her desk and began to type.
“Name?”
“Davis Florence.”
“Date of birth?”
“September second, twenty-four oh-five”
“Colony of Birth?”
“Earth.”
“Home City?”
“Tarsus.”
“Badge Number?”
“Karen.” He scowled at her. “This is rather painful.”
“Sorry, sorry. If we get back to Earth without any medical slips filled out they’ll suspect something. I wasn’t supposed to be giving you this many sleep-aids you know.”
“I appreciate it.”
“Have you been sleeping better?”
“I’ve been sleeping longer.”
Karen walked over to a small refrigerated cabinet above where Florence was sitting. Releasing icy smoke into the room, she removed a vial of blue liquid. She inserted the vial into her injection gun. Florence turned his hand over and she pressed the barrel against his skin. A blue foam covered his palm and in seconds it hardened.
“It should start to peel off in a day or two. How did you burn yourself anyhow?”
“When Jackson woke me up this morning. I got up to open the door and…”
“And?”
“My temperature regulator shot out. My door handle was burning hot.” Florence remarked quickly.
“We are passing by an incredibly hot quasar. But if it was that hot in your room you’d be a pile of ashes.” Garza smiled and laughed in disbelief thinking he was joking. The charm in her smile made him crack open his reserved exterior. He looked down at his right hand, let out a deep exhale and said,
“Karen, have you ever had a dream feel so real that you wake up in the morning feeling any pain you felt in the dream?”
“Are you suggesting this happened to you in a dream?”
“I know it sounds crazy, but the burn proves it, doesn’t it? I had a nightmare I was burning, I could smell my flesh cooking. It felt so real.”
“Hmmm” She paused to think for a second. “Have you ever heard of a nocebo effect?”
“Can’t say that I have.”
“There are instances, albeit rare ones, in which people who are told something is poison exhibit symptoms of poisoning despite having been given mere water. The same idea applies to lucid dreams; the psyche can be more powerful than any drug or stimulant.”
“Do these symptoms ever manifest themselves physically? Like my burn?”
“I believe I’ve read about a woman who woke up with a bee sting she insisted she got in her dream. It was dismissed pretty quickly though, doctors told her she must have been stung by a bee in her sleep.”
“How did she know it was bee?”
“What?”
“Did doctors confirm it was a bee sting?”
“I mean, yeah I would assume so.”
“You said she dreamt of a bee that stung her in her sleep. If she was asleep, how did she know it was a bee?”
“These nightmares have really been taxing you, haven’t they?”
“Karen, if anyone asks-“
“-You burned yourself trying to fix your temperature regulator yourself, I got it, I got.”
Florence wanted to believe he was one of those instances. So he did. With a comforting smile, she wrapped a bandage around his hand over the blue medical plaster. The gentility of her touch soothed him. He sat trying not to think about the commotion he knew was going on above. He wished he could live out the rest of his career down here, alone with Karen.
“Thanks, Doc.”
“No problem, Captain. I suggest you holster your weapon on your left hip from now on. Just in case you need to draw.”
“Why would I need to shoot anything way out here?” Florence laughed. Her smile disappeared, and she bowed her head to stare at the cold ground.
“Is it true what they said? That we found the transmission?”
“It’s true.”
“What now?”
A myriad of different ships had been sent to search for the lost transmission of Nero IX. This mission had become something of a joke among space captains. Goose Chase Nero IX they called it. For a century, fifty different ships had taken shifts scouring the universe-side for any sign of communication from the surface. He paused for a moment to hide his own concern, hoping to ease Garza’s anxious mind. All she wanted was for him to tell her it was some kind of mistake.
“We make history.” Florence said assuredly.
Both walked back through the dim hallway. All the while knowing deep down this could have been the last time they found themselves alone together. Wanting nothing more than to express himself, Florence winced withholding that emotion which jeopardizes duty. The elevator ride was a silent one, she could not find the words.
They reached the command deck. Florence stole one last look at Karen, she did the same and then the door beeped, and it slid open. The crew all stood about impatiently around the star map. They saluted their captain and took their seats, irritated they were made to hold on to their anxiety for longer than was usually necessary. Florence apologized and took his seat at the head of the table.
“Alright you alright, Captain?” Asked Pvt. Simmons
“Just a minor burn. My cabin’s temperature regulator malfunctioned.”
“You should get Knope on that sir. We’re picking up record temperatures outside the ship.”
Florence scanned the lines of his crew’s anxious expressions. Seven of them total. “I have. I’ll assume that’s why he’s not here yet.”
“Knope said he had some old video equipment in his office. He volunteered to convert the transmission to a viable formant.”
“Then I’ll assume my temperature regulator isn’t fixed yet. Okay, how did we find this thing? We’re running the same course as the ship before us.”
Lt. Jackson had rehearsed the answer in his head a hundred times while they waited for their Captain. His entire life had culminated to this moment and he was impatient to watch the transmission.
“Reese noticed a power surge in the cabins and to conserve some fuel, he shut off the autopilot. We drifted two degrees off the auto-charted course, closer to the Pegasus Quasar until we picked up what could have only been a human signal. We followed the same course until we had downloaded the entire transmission. It seems like the gravity of Nero IX pulls in radio waves, the signal was stripped too thin to travel any further.”
Florence nodded his left to right in a manner that acknowledged a familiar and insubordinate ineptitude. Without having to utter a breath, he chastised Jackson for changing the course of the ship. The crew sat quietly in shared embarrassment. Florence turned to look at his pilot.
“Have we entered the planet’s orbit?”
Reese cleared his throat and replied, “We’ve anchored the ship just outside it. The majority of the transmission was fully downloaded without having to go any further. We’re closer to Nero IX than any other ship in the past one-hundred years.”
“Good. Did Knope give any indication as to how long the conversion would take? ”
Just then, Knope hobbled in on his crutch from the hallway leading to the main elevator.
“Already done, sir. It wasn’t easy, I had to run it through six different converters it was so old! Oh and about your temperature regulator, Captain. It seems-”
“-The data slip, Knope. Give it to me, we can discuss my accommodations afterwards.”
Florence laid the slip down onto a blue glass panel on his arm rest. The lights grew dim and the projected star-map was replaced by holographic static. Short bursts of garbled speech soothed itself into a quiet chant when the picture was clear and the lens had focused. A man was in the middle of an empty prison cell. His back was turned against the door, he knelt with his face to the floor. All around him, painted on the walls were symbols. A language Florence would swear he had seen before. The symbols curved upwards then downwards in arches and in some places came straight down.
“Eli, llama sabath chani” The man whispered through tears.
Suddenly, the cell door came crashing down. In walked two raggedly dressed men. Without any hesitation they picked the man up from under his arms and pinned him to the wall, his feet remained dangling a foot from the ground.
“Llama sabath chani!” The poor soul exclaimed while the two towering men each raised from their pockets a long nail and hammer. Using their shoulders to prop him up against the wall, the men gently pressed the points into the palms of his hands. Blood trickled down in a small stream. They raised their hammers and beat down with precision on the flat-top. Blood spurted from the man’s hands as he screamed in agony. In three blows the nails had struck true through the man’s pale skin. One of the large leather-clad men held their victim in place while the other nailed his feet.
On their way out, one of them stopped. He turned up to face the center of the ceiling and looked right into the lens of the holo-cam. A blanket of dreadful curiosity came over the command deck as his eyes seemed to pierce through space and time. The timestamp on the hologram dated the recording to almost a century before, but Florence felt he stared directly at them and no one else. The ragged man paused for a moment then strode out the knocked down door.
The hologram fizzled into static and only a white echo could be heard. The command deck was quiet like the sea of black they drifted through. The crew waited for their captain to make some sense of the transmission. Florence believed he had envisioned every possibility, every course of action. However, the unsettling hologram left him speechless and for the first time; without contingency. He desperately hoped for something, anyone to break the eerie silence that now possessed the command deck.
“Well that’s one way to hang up on someone.” Knope mumbled through the darkness. The room remained silent and he shot a guilty smile at his captain, indicative he tried his best. The crew’s anxious anticipation grew by the second, Florence’s window of control over the situation was rapidly slipping. He was afraid.
“Does anyone notice anything peculiar about the date of the transmission?” Florence addressed his crew.
“October 30th. Twenty-three forty?” Simmons answered promptly.
“Yes but does anyone know the significance of that date?” The deck was without answer.
“Well, the United Nations Criminal Justice Reform Act was signed into law by this time.”
“Right, all penal institutions in the galaxy were burned down with inmates still in them. Captain, are you suggesting the people we saw in that hologram survived the UN nuclear terraform?”
“According to the date on that holo-cam.”
Knope interjected, “Sir, their computer and radio transmission equipment were about as reliable as the crap they made in the twentieth century. The date has to be wrong. There’s no way anything could have survived that glassing. I’ve seen what interplanetary ballistic missiles can do to a planet. Everything on the surface and ten miles below ground turns to dust.”
“So you think that two seemingly alien men just waltzed into the best guarded prison planet this side of the galaxy, murdered an inmate and no-one ever heard about it? If this happened while the planet was controlled by the UN don’t you think there would have been reports? Federal institutions like this one have impeccable beaurocratic systems in place.”
“Well then it’s a damn shame we nuked the place. I’m sure they kept all their documents sitting neat and tidy in a desk somewhere, written on paper! Which in case you didn’t know, was highly flammable. Maybe this was part of some riot, from what I’ve read, things like this tended to happen in these places.”
“That doesn’t explain the date, Knope. In case you forgot, it’s our job to patrol for any signs of human distress. If there is a chance there are people down there we’re duty-bound to check it out. The ship’s a planet hopper for a reason.”
“Don’t lecture me on the designations of space-crafts, fly-boy. I build them. You know how difficult it was to keep all the clocks in the known universe synchronized with the date and time on Earth in those days? It was off by a week, big deal” Knope turned to Florence “Sir, even if some-one did miraculously survive the blast, it’s highly unlikely they spawned generations and are thriving on that nuclear wasteland! You can’t be contemplating going down there!”
With a deep and calming sigh, Captain Florence ended the argument.
“It’s not up to any of us whether we go down there or not. Simmons, relay the entire transmission to mission command on Vega.”
“I’m on it, sir. It’ll take a few minutes.”
“Reese, hold our anchor here until we hear back from Vega.”
“Yes, sir!”
“Garza prep the rad-suits, fill up the oxygen tanks and ready up some microbial shots.”
The crew looked at Garza in distress. They waited to gauge her reaction. She pursed her lips and with determination responded,
“Right away, Captain.” and made for the elevator.
After he had delegated tasks in preparation for a potential drop, Florence and Knope found themselves alone on the command deck. Knope grabbed his crutch and pulled himself up from his chair. With the tip of his finger he pushed up his glasses. Florence noticed Knope only did this before delivering bad news.
“Captain, about you temperature regulator. I tracked all the nitrogen pipes around your cabin and they all seemed fine. Your compressor is a little worn-out, I’d recommend having a new one installed when we get back to Mars.”
“And?”
“Sir?”
“What else, Knope?”
“Well that’s just it, Sir. There is nothing else.”
“You know, I kept you on cause I thought you were the best. Ten years ago you told me you could fix anything, Terry.”
“I can but there’s nothing to fix. Maybe get a fan?”
They laughed together.
“Davis,” He pushed up his glasses. “There are only eight of us, this place hasn’t been charted in a century. I don’t want to believe Vega would have us drop on Nero IX without sending a proper reconnaissance satellite first. I mean, we have no idea what’s down there!”
“Then you don’t know Vega very well. We’re disposable, I thought the last ten years you’d have learned that. Hey-” He smirked, “At least you get to stay on the ship.”
then walked down the hallway toward the elevator.
