Tag: ghosts on an alien wind

Cheating, a little: I actually wrote this yesterday. But today was complicated.

We followed the almost-path of gorvines all the way to the Dig site, to absolutely nobody’s surprise. Well, I know I wasn’t surprised, and I assume the Anticipant couldn’t be. If Oft had any sudden revelations, he didn’t talk about them.

He was the first one to notice the regular sets of discoloration on the walls, though. “More places for torches,” he grimly observed, and I didn’t blame him at all. The Scouts had been here for a reason, and it involved the Erebus Dig. I tried not to think about the implications of that, and I definitely didn’t try to think of the suggestion that the Scouts were making this trip in the dark. It would have been a beautiful morning anywhere else in the world, and I absolutely did not want to be here.

Navigating this place at midnight sounded like a great way to court a heart attack.
From my last visit I remembered that there’s not much of the Dig aboveground. The topside part of the planetary defense center or storehouse or whatever the inhabitants used the place for before their Last Stand had been broken down to gravel, making the area look like a Jeffersonian parking lot. That was there, and still stubbornly free of any vegetation or even moss.

What was different was the primitive elevator centered over the Dig shaft, camouflage netting still draped it to hide it from the sky.

Ran out of excuses to work on this!

“What about the Dig, itself?”

“Best guess is that it was a Last Stand.” I didn’t like walking on the gorvines, but standing still would have been worse. This particular species was attracted to human scents, and would shift to get closer to us if we didn’t keep moving. Nobody’s ever been attacked by one, but spill any blood around a gorvine, and it’ll go looking for it. “It was just like how it was on all the other Tomb Worlds. They reported lots of signs of fighting, tons of smashed-in doors and walls, and not a bone to be found anywhere.”

“A half-told tale is far too tall,” offered the Anticipant. Either she was trying really hard to speak normally, or I was trying really hard to understand her, because I got the gist.

“Yeah, all of the reports leave out how it feels to be down here.” I scowled at the encroaching wilderness. “I guess we can’t get away with calling the Dig a ‘infective apprehension area’ or ‘static neurosis zone,’ or whatever else the head-stirrers are saying instead ‘really damn creepy’ this week. It’s not an accident that the main bases are all on the other side of the planet.”

Exploration!

I’d never been to Erebus Dig before; and even if I could go back there, I wouldn’t, ever again. The very look of it reeked of awfulness as I set the hauler down on the overgrown pad — and, yeah, I know: you can’t see smells. I saw it anyway.

When we got out, I also saw that the pad wasn’t overgrown enough. Somebody had used Earthtech reaction engines on it in the recent past. Oft noticed it, too. “How long, Pam?” he asked me.

“Not recently,” I decided. “A year, maybe? There’s still soot marks from the burned-off vines, but no smell.” One-Eighteen’s ground vines looks normal to us, but we don’t burn any of them if we can help it. Their sap collects copper and iron, and the smell when it ignites can be a bit much. “They didn’t clear away the brush, though.”

“Doing so might have attracted notice, if somebody flew over this site from the air” Oft responded. “A small chance, to be sure, but the Scouts are famously known for being ready for anything. I hope they did not use this pad very often.”

I didn’t ask him by what Oft meant by ‘hope,’ because I could make a few guesses, myself — and none of them sounded very nice. There was also always the chance that he’d come up with something even worse that I hadn’t thought of.

Just realized I needed to add a scene.

I was annoyingly fresh-faced and well-rested the next morning; there had been a pharmaceutical care package waiting for me at home. Eight hours of guaranteed restful sleep, full of amazing dreams, and complete with all the mood-shifters you could want to keep mental trauma from sticking around and turning into neurosis. I would have preferred Syah to stick around, but he had been a gentleman about it. I didn’t even think he was wrong to be one, either.

I still wished he had stuck around.

Greg had a look similar to mine, only a bit more so. It made me raise an eyebrow. “You all right, Greg? You almost look ready to fly.”

“Oh, do I? I was wondering. That dose I took last night had quite a wallop.” He said all of that perfectly clearly, with no vagueness or loss of focus. Whatever’s in that brew does the business. “I haven’t had dreams like that in years.”

“Same here,” I admitted as I sat. “What is all of this chaos doing to the schedule, anyway?”

He snorted. “What schedule? Right now I have everything grounded or on hold until Burcu shows up. She’s going to be a handful, and until we can figure out what she and the rest of the Council lunatics are really looking for, we’re going to need to walk careful. If only they’d tell us what their game is!”

“I don’t want to sound like Nur, Greg, but: maybe they didn’t have an agenda at all when they came here? They’re just here to act mysterious and see what happens?”

“Space travel isn’t that cheap, Pam.”

“Then I don’t know. Maybe the Great Powers gives them a budget to be assholes to colonists, and it’s just the end of their fiscal year.”

Added about 1000 words today, in fact. All I could stand before I got bleary-eyed.

“All right.” I walked over to Syah. “Hey! Get up, stop feeling sorry for yourself, and walk it off!”

For a moment, I didn’t think that it worked; Syah almost jumped up, while still sitting. The way shame and guilt were fighting each other in his expression made me wonder whether a full therapy session might not be in order. Then his face cleared, and he even laughed. “That’s some bedside manner you have there, Pam.”

“Blame her,” I replied, pointing one thumb over my shoulder. “I’m just saying what she’s too nice and polite to. I’m just the shuttle jockey with a checklist.”

“You’re not ‘just’ anything, Pam.”

“Hey, you can’t distract me here, Syah,” I blatantly lied. “Look. There was a situation, you tried something, it didn’t work, and somebody got hurt. Welcome to the Tomb Worlds. If you really need more time to proc— to get over it, say so. There’s no shame in it! But if you don’t? We’ve got a mess, Syah. The faster you’re on top of it, the faster the mess goes away.”

“That’s true,” Syah murmured. He set his shoulders. “Right. Just keep going, huh?”

“Just keep going. Gina, can he get out of here?” At her nod, Syah levered himself out of bed one and a half handed, waving off my attempt to help him.

As he dressed, Gina murmured to me, “Well, that was quick. He’s got it bad for you, you know.”

I didn’t, entirely, but I liked hearing that from an outside observer. “Great. It’d be nice if he could figure it out.”

Creepyness!

I was doing ‘cosmetic maintenance’ in the shuttle docks when they throttled back the security coverage. It was my professional opinion that fussing over the haulers until they were humming improved their performance efficiency, and I had the reduced downtime statistics to justify it. It was my personal opinion that nobody liked being reminded that the haulers were quasi-organic in nature. Intellectually, I could see why, but it never bothered me personally.

All of which means I was waist-deep in a hauler’s jet intake chamber scrubbing down carbon buildup when the lights flickered — and went out. That didn’t startle me. What did was the tiger alarm; I nearly bruised the hauler while yanking myself out.

“Process!” I shouted (despite myself) while reaching for a pistol that wasn’t there. “What’s the situation?” Silence. I started to get alarmed, then remembered that the power was out, and relaxed. Then I saw that the power was back on, which made me stop relaxing.

I instinctively stopped myself from calling out again. The last thing The Process needed right now was any distractions. Instead I looked at the regular communications channels — and nearly threw the phone away. Everything was jammed up, with static, feedback, and strobing lights that horribly tickled my stomach. I didn’t throw up, myself, which put me among the twenty percent of the people who didn’t. The vomiting were lucky, at that. Five people ended up with burst blood vessels in the eyes, and one had a partial stroke. All easily treatable, sure, but still painful as hell.

The Din (that’s what we called it, after) lasted five minutes and twenty-three seconds, and I don’t remember any of it, really. I dimly remember running around, pulling people out of workstations and hauler pits, while futilely trying to turn off every screaming communications device. It was impossible to think more clearly, with that Din pounding in our ears, but XHum trains its people properly. Our reflexes were the right ones; pull people out of danger and let the horrible noises flow over us. Until it stopped, as suddenly as it began.

Moving stuff around and adding to it!

“That’s an unfortunately good point, The Process. I almost wish you hadn’t made it.”

“Why did you say that?”

“Because I’d rather that they were crazy, instead of wrong. Crazy is just crazy. You can fix that. But wrong?” I shuddered, just a bit. “First thing you have to do there is make sure that you’re right.”

“Then you should take some comfort in the thought that humanity is very good at being sure about things.” There was a note in The Process’s voice that I didn’t hear very often. It was a tiny richness, a small complexity. At times like that, The Process almost sounded alive. “I think that’s how you manage to survive in this universe of nightmares.”

“Nightmares?” I looked up, because that’s where I always imagined The Process was hanging out.

“Oh, yes, Wind-Walker Tanaka. I never knew the Amalgamation — or, rather, those parts of me that did have been ‘lost forever, like tears in rain.’ Like you, I can only imperfectly grasp what they must have been like. What we could have been like, if only things had worked as they were supposed to. Instead, we are left with dead world after dead world, so extensive that even now we do not know how many were murdered, and left nameless and unremembered. I cannot feel emotions on my own, but I suspect that if I could, I would feel sorrow, and rage, and regret.”

I shivered “But not despair?”

“No. I do not think that I would. There is still hope. Your species is the final offspring of the Amalgamation, Pamela.” I blinked at that. “You are worthy of them. Worth enough that, as long as you live, it lives on as well. Perhaps one day we will rebuild it all, anew — or even know why it was destroyed.”

I laughed, bitterly. “Maybe. But you must know by now: if we ever do find the things that did all of this, we’re going to do our level best to destroy them. Thoroughly. Mercilessly. Nothing held back.”

“I know,” The Process said serenely. “Fortunately, I can feel an analog to satisfaction, I think. When the day of reckoning comes, I expect to experience that emotion in the fullest.”

More work!

“We decided to degrade the coverage,” Greg told me and Nur over a hasty working lunch. “It looks like we’re not finding that part any time soon.”

“Is that smart?” I asked him.

“Depends on whether you think degraded coverage is better than having the cameras all flicker in and out at random,” Greg replied. “Or whether Nur can actually find that part.”

“I can’t find that part,” Nur replied. “I think we can jury-rig a replacement, but it’ll take time. Meanwhile, the system keeps getting more damaged. I don’t know what will happen if we keep trying to run the network at full coverage, but I’d rather not have all of the security net fry. That’ll take even longer to repair.”

“So we degrade the coverage,” Greg agreed. “If it makes you feel any better, your boyfriend thinks we should take the risk of a full collapse, and work very, very quickly.”

“You don’t agree, though.” I let the ‘boyfriend’ thing slide. Damned if I knew what we were doing along those lines, although that was more than half my fault.

Greg shrugged. “I’d like to agree. But if the security net goes all the way down, any saboteurs would have a field day. At least this way we’re still protected if somebody comes down with situational psychosis. It’s the old better than nothing trick, as my grandmother used to say.”

I realized I had to do something fairly horror-y, and that might actually get the book in proper shape. Here’s hoping!

“He’s not doing well, is he?” I asked Gina quietly.

She looked back at Syah, who was sitting up in the bed. He had a handheld in his good hand, and was trying not to scowl at it. “He’s healing,” she allowed. “Just not as quickly as he should be. There’s some kind of resistance going on, in his head. I don’t think Syah’s giving himself full permission to get better.”

“Wait. Why wouldn’t he do that, Gina? Everybody knows you can’t let yourself get in the way of your own body.”

Gina quirked one side of her mouth. “Why do you think, Pam? It’s guilt. Heck, even the readouts say so. Poor bastard probably blames himself for [Spoiler].”

I looked at Syah myself. There was a tension there, uncomfortable and unspoken. I sighed. “I want to say that’s ridiculous, but it’s not, is it? Dammit, he stuck his arm down in the middle of live circuitry to sequester the sabotage. What was he supposed to do, use both hands?”

“He probably thinks so. Yes,” she went on before I could interrupt, “that’s stupid of him. You’d be amazed how stupid smart people can be, when it comes to second-guessing themselves.”

“Okay,” I managed, after a minute. “Can I do anything for him?”

“Sure. Tell him to get up, stop feeling sorry for himself, and walk it off.” I blinked at Gina, and she laughed. “What do you think this is, the Dark Ages? You can’t talk a mental block to death. Besides, the crystals don’t lie, Pam. They say he’s just in a funk, and they’re right. I’ve tried to tell him that, but maybe he’ll listen to you. I figure its worth a shot.”