Chapter 11
The Kraken Class
I can’t open my eyes. Even though the space outside my head is silent and void, I daren’t open my eyes to meet the nothingness. I can’t bring myself to admit he is gone. Kolt was my friend. I can’t believe in what happened. I just don’t want to.
There has to be some kind of other explanation. Even though my body is cold and I must be entering the first, if not later stages of hypothermia, I don’t want to get up.
I can’t face it alone. This world will eat me whole, chew me up and spit my bones out if that man isn’t around to save me anymore. I don’t have to lie to myself. I can be honest here in the confines of my own thoughts. I can admit I’m scared. My ego has taken such a battering lately that it will hurt it no more to beat it again.
Kolt kept me safe where otherwise I would have died. I can’t bring myself to think he had been anything less than real.
Private Kolter Gespenst. It hits me right now what his unfortunate surname meant in Russian. Ghost. I was never one with a flair for language but I know that. I’m not sure I remember how. Just one of those tid-bits of information that your mind stubbornly holds onto for no reason at all.
Private Kolter Ghost… Private Kolt Ghost. Poltergeist. I want to laugh at the irony. Even if I can call it irony. Unfortunate? Coincidental? But another thought enters my mind even though I want nothing other than to chase it out. Had I dreamed the whole thing?
I know of times when people have dreamed up a superior identity to protect themselves during times of great need. I had scoffed at the stories about those kinds of people. They said the mind sometimes needed it. It sometimes needed to relinquish control and hand it over to someone or something less than real to take the noose from around their necks.
The unconscious mind dreamed up a powerful entity in order to save its conscious partner. Is that what I had done? Every time we hit a problem, Kolt had embarrassingly outmatched me. Physically, mentally and in durability. The thought sickened me so much that I opened my eyes and pulled my stiff and iced body to stand without flattering or indulging myself with the time to regain blood flow.
The thought hurt in ways I didn’t know thoughts could. I already missed him. I pained for him. Like a parasite ripped from his host, bringing their symbiosis to an unsolicited end. I longed for him. My friend. I mourned for him. And he may never have even existed.
My eyes eventually focus. Quite some time after my stubborn legs start carrying me towards the decayed space ship. I don’t trust in them at first. What they tell me they can see. How could there be anyone else here with me?
I can see the figure of a woman in the distance. I can make out her gorgeous curves through the hail storm. I can see her standing tall and confident, her weight resting over one hip in a sexy pose. Her long legs I can just make out through the flanking snow, and even her long, flowing copper red hair. I know her. I can hear her crying into her hands.
I remember her from the Morris-Cooper Mining Company. She was one of the guards. With her looks, her figure especially, she was something of a symbol to us all. Men cooped up in there together and alone dreaming up things that can never have happened.
Maybe she wasn’t even that good looking by other standards but how were we to know? She might have been dog ugly but better to think of her than the grey walls or our imaginations. Those were the only other things we could look into to find anything like some kind of stimulation.
I’m barely conscious. I could be dreaming right now. But it doesn’t feel like I am. I hate to have to do anything to convince myself if I am dreaming or awake. I can’t bring myself to administer the “pinch” test so I slap myself hard across my frost bitten face. My skin responds immediately to the harsh pain and I immediately know it to be real.
But it all feels real enough. Right down to the numbing cold of the snow around my feet. Right back to the piercing pain in my battered head. I reach up a hand as I instinctively stagger forward into the darkness and snow and rub the back of my head.
Stabbing pains shoot right down my face, my whole body and through my chest. I take it away to find it stained in copious blood. I’m lucky to be standing. It feels like I’ve been out on the drink yet again but I know I haven’t touched the stuff for months.
That feeling you get when you’ve had one or two too many. That feeling that you’re invincible gives way after just a few more pints and you find yourself lost inside of your own skull.
Then some kind of auto-pilot takes over, one that seems to be programmed to get you to safety, to home or whatever is closest. You find yourself leaning on that homing beacon and letting it dictate the rhythm of your feet. I feel like that right now. I should be able to listen to that hazy and distant voice that tells me the figure up ahead is nothing but trouble.
I should be able to, and I probably could if I felt alright, realize that she is probably heading up the security detail that has come here to either escort me back or kill me. But I can’t. The voice that should be screaming that logic right in the front of my face is too distant, too broken and beaten by my fall. I can’t think anything but getting to safety.
I trudge just a little closer to the dark figure ahead. I think I’m calling to her but my head is so battered I can’t tell if I just want to, or I actually am. The snow is still hurtling down in volumes. Every time I plant my step, in the time it takes me to move a foot, it is buried by the virgin white fluffy new snow. I can hear her. I’m sure she is real.
I manage to fight back the urge to close my eyes. To stop fighting and drop dead on my ass. Maybe if I let go and stop resisting, I will see my buddy Kolt on the other side, and we can continue whatever journey we were on. But something inside of me, just like he had predicted, still wanted to survive.
Some strong part of me, one I though to be long dead, still wanted to battle on and make it no matter what.
‘Hey!’ I called to her. I screamed at the top of my voice. It was all I could manage. The snow drowned me out and blocked the range of my lungs. It stuffed my mouth full of snowflakes and robbed me of my breath.
But I think she heard. The crying, the distant sound of it anyway, stopped immediately and I can see the black shadow shift. I can see her posture move through the veil of snow. I should be afraid but I’m not. I know deep down she is here to cause me trouble! But contrary to everything I though she would do, she comes running through the snow and takes me by the hand.
I was right about her sobbing, but her face changes from deep despair to immediate concern as she studies me through her teary eyes. I drop right away. I only had enough steam inside me to make it to her. She is confident in her stride and upright posture. It must have been all of those years in her position as a guard at the mine. But she oozed strength and power.
But that was a distant cousin compared to her compassion. I could see it in her eyes. This was the first time I ever saw her face. I knew her by her figure and by the color of her hair. I knew her because I’d dreamed of her pose a million times and struggled to bring my eyes off her hips, even after the threat of many a beating. But I’d never seen her deep blue eyes that reflected back everything caught in them.
I had never seen her pale white skin, her rounded cheekbones and thin, perky lips. I had never had that pleasure. She wore the same red armor that I did. But her’s was near pristine. Over it she wore a thick padded jacket. Brown in color with hints of fur around the collars and sleeves. It must have kept her toasty warm and I can’t help but be instantly jealous of her and of it.
‘Parker?’ She asked with a tone of surprise, which was thinly masked along with excitement and genuine relief. She didn’t wait for me to reply. She threw her arm around my shoulder and pulled me to my feet with a cute groan of effort. I’m too weak to even stand right now.
I walk with her but my feet only manage a pointless scuff against the snow as she takes most of my weight. She is strong and fast. I feel useless again. My ego has taken enough sho
ts of late and I should really be trying much harder to impress the girl I’ve spent so long secretly lusting after. But I just can’t manage it. I just can’t make my feet move with hers. All I can do is protest.
‘Put me down!’ I growl at her. Basically spitting on her kind gesture of help. I must have shocked her because she did. She let me fall to the snow but steadied my weight every inch of the way down. She must have thought she had been hurting me because she immediately hit the ground, took me in both hands by the shoulders, and stared into my eyes with a magnified look of concern.
My heart flutters. Like a silly kid with a crush. Like a stupid emotional teenager who suddenly has the full attention of some girl he has secretly admired for his whole life. I would probably be blushing if I hadn’t lost so much blood.
‘What is it?’ She asks me softly with the kindest voice I think I have ever heard. Her voice is sweet, soothing and I immediately liken it to an angel’s. In spite of having never heard one.
‘I can walk there myself!’ I growl at her again ungratefully. I can’t. I was hoping, in some stupid and masculine way, that if I created a brief argument I would be able to buy enough time for me to gather my senses and summon the power I needed to walk myself. She didn’t reply. But she didn’t look hurt either. She just smiled at me. That was the last thing I had expected too.
‘Why are you helping me?’ I yell at her over the howling wind and spiraling snow.
‘I saw you…’ She tries to shout back but has to stop mid flow to shield her mouth from a much stronger gust of wind. ‘I saw you struggle in the snow. I don’t know. I just want to help you.’ She finished. It wasn’t an explanation as such. In fact it wasn’t even half of one.
But that primal auto-pilot inside my head was kicking off at me silently, yelling at me from behind my own mouth, to get to safety and try to get warm. I am again in control of my senses. Like nothing had happened. Like my dying mind has flooded me with every bit of power it has left, knowing that if it doesn’t, I will die.
I pull with all my focus, pressing my hands into the deep snow and arching my back to stand on my weakened legs. I make it to fully upright but my oddly kind captor keeps a good hold of my hands the whole way. She holds me almost lovingly. A thought flashes quickly, briefly, but shockingly through my battered mind. What if she isn’t real either?
The thought hurts and makes me immediately hostile to her. I rip my hands away and her eyes widen with embarrassment. But I dismiss the thought as quickly as it surfaces. It must have been a stray though. First of all, I am certain Kolt had been real. Ghost or not. Dead or not. I know what I saw and I know what we did. Besides, and second, I remember this girl. Even though I don’t know her name.
I shake my head at my own stupidity and my own shame.
‘Let’s go.’ I raise a tired arm to what I can see of the frozen and beaten Kraken ship ahead. We need to get inside or our chances of survival are slim. She, without asking or feeling worried that I’ll recoil again, takes my arm, interlocks it with hers and we carry on. My legs decide to work again, motivated by my newly sober state, but every time I tense any muscle it hurts.
We trudge through the thick and strength sapping snow for what feels like forever. I can see the ship better with each staggered and labored step. It is more beaten down than I had though. It’s grey metallic hull is scarred with flames and cracked open completely in some places. I can only see a small part of it. The bulk of the ship is hidden beneath the ice that has formed up around it. The scars about its hull are clearly laser strikes. Maybe even some heavy duty projectile damage too.
It’s far older than I had been expecting and that realization makes my heart sink. Kolt can’t have been there in the flesh. I already know that. I just don’t want to think about it. The ship died in it’s relative youth. Maybe even during the colony wars.
‘How do we get in?’ She leans into me, almost pressing her chest against mine, and shouts into my ears with her hands clasped together like a funnel so I can hear her better. As if I would know? I just shrug my shoulders, panting for breath like an out of shape fifty something smoker of sixty a day. My tongue is too tied to reply to her.
I feel all warm inside, even though it is Baltic outside. She starts running her opened palms over the surface of the metal. It must be cold to the touch but she doesn’t flinch or anything. My energy starts coming back as I take in as many deep breaths as I can without looking like too much of a sissy.
The snow relents at long last and I can finally make out the bulk of the hull. The shape of the ship, something I have virtually worshipped since birth, comes slowly into view. The Kraken Class shape was infamous, desired by friends and enemies alike throughout the Colony Wars, respected and feared. Two spherical discs mounted parallel to one another across a triangular shaped frame. The longest tip of the triangular connecting hull pointed out to the back. It was constructed of the strongest steel known to man.
It’s weapon systems were a true product of its time. Caught between the technological advancements that beckoned laser based weapons into the mainstream and the underlying faith in the reliability of projectile based torpedo like ballistic missiles.
The hull would have been mounted with a few laser cannon turrets, of varying size and power, but the true power of this megalith was in its ballistic missile weapons platform. From the spherical shaped mounts, the Kraken, once locked into orbit above any would be victim, could launch ballistic missiles from space. The threat of nuclear war, on Earth that is, never disappeared after a strange time known as the Cold War.
The world split in two, each side governed by a different system of rules and theories, grew suspicious of one another and devolved weapons of mass destruction to act as vehicles for fear. Deterrence was the name of the game and the character of that war.
The Kraken, I always felt, was one final nod, a respectful glance back in time, to that time and the legacy of it. The Kraken was the ultimate form of deterrence. In its day, nobody would dare oppose it. Back then, everything was coming up Russian.
We trudge around the frame of the lost ship, looking desperately for a way in. One of the discs is buried entirely beneath the ice and snow, the other stands up at an odd angle, snapped in half and hanging there limp. The ship must have impacted the surface of the planet on a tilt.
The buried disc was the primary wing and main platform, which also contained the bridge and most often the hyper drive engine, was propped up against a rocky outcropping of the mountain. It hung there, eerily clinging to the side of the mountain, limp and dead. Never found. Never even searched for.
We might be the first two people to look upon it in hundreds of years. I can feel a tear welling up in the back of my eye. I have admired these ships for all my life, seeing one is emotional in such an odd kind of way. It gives me a sense of fulfillment and purpose. That feeling after so many years of feeling nothing but the lack of purpose, the lack of anything good to speak of, is nothing short of overwhelming.
But that isn’t why I feel like crying. Kolt. He can’t have been real. I cannot deny the truth that my eyes are showing me. This ship is dead, frozen in a time capsule, an endless relic to one single event in time and space. The moment it crashed and everyone on board was likely killed.
‘There.’ She says in her sweet and comforting voice. She raises her hand and points at something she has seen half way up the buried disc. The one that has been buried in the ground. It is an opening of some kind but I can’t make it out through the snow. My head is hurting a lot now.
I keep checking for blood at the back of my head but I just keep dusting off flakes of dried brown, already clotted blood. The wound has stopped bleeding but I feel like death. My head is throbbing from blood loss and I’m finding it hard to think at all. I wish right now that my auto pilot would kick back in. But I guess that must be out of steam too.
‘Ok, lets try.’ I say through labored breaths and nod to her. She pounces up the slippery and angl
ed surface with grace and ease, beckoning me to follow like I’m the old and boring dad to her eager and impetuous inner child. I drag my broken body up the surface, lying flat against it and using any small crack or hand hold I can to drag my weight upwards.
The hull, the outer surface of the disc, is riddled with large bullet holes. I can use them though they are rusted and brittle as hand and foot holds as I make the hard climb. Her speed and grace, and my obvious admiration for her, spurs me on. I pull harder and harder on each dull metal crack and finally make it to the opening she had spotted.
It’s either a cooling vent or a weapons discharge point, a barrel or torpedo tube if you like. She peers in hastily but sees nothing. Not surprisingly. She is assessing the measurements of the tube and so am I. By my tired guess I figure we should be able to fit through but the squeeze will be tight. If it turns into a dead end then turning will be impossible and we might even get trapped in there. I’m cold enough, tired enough and desperate enough to take the chance.
‘Looks good.’ I say to her. She smiles back contently and slides in first. I’m glad I didn’t have to do the hero bull and pretend like I wanted to shove my exposed head into an unknown environment first. I watch her shapely figure disappear into the dark tunnel barely big enough to fit her hips through, and bend down to watch her wriggle through the small crawl space.
My heart is starting to beat with fearful anticipation and lust. She moves gracefully and no red blooded man could ignore it was a good sight to see. But I’m tired and hungry and I can’t bring myself to push harder for the last few ounces of energy to try to talk to her.
Maybe I’m just being pathetic? The cold is pushing me on though. I know deep down that if I stay put I’ll freeze and die. My head is cloudy to start with and there is no way I’ll survive a night out here on the exposed mountain face.
I glance back, longingly, to the cave now in the distance where I had last seen Kolt. I wish to the bottom of my heart that he was still here. In whatever form he was. Ghost or not. I just wish he would come back.
I hadn’t realized how much I had grown to like him and depend upon him in the short time I had known him. I breathe a deep sigh and push my head into the dark tunnel and follow my still nameless friend, foe, rescuer or captor, I’m still not sure.
The tunnel drags my breath out of me as soon as I’m all the way in. My feet are just about tucked into the cramped and polished crawl space. I’m glad to be out of the wind and it feels a little warmer now that we are at least inside, but I don’t like it. I’m a miner. I don’t mind small spaces or confined areas but this has a different feel to it than I am used to.
This feels cramped and alien. It feels wrong. Like I am out of control completely. Like I’m the passenger in a sports car and someone else, someone I don’t know or trust, is in the driving seat and slamming the accelerator pedal. Such an odd feeling this tunnel has summoned up inside of me.
‘Wait.’ I shout, more plead, down the tunnel wherein I can see literally nothing. I can hear her sweet voice echo back. I can hear the soothing syllables bounce back and forth from one side of the metallic frame and to the other and back again. But the echo drowns out any meaning and I can’t figure out what she said.
I’m alone in my thoughts. Right where I just don’t want to be. I can’t help but start to panic and in my weakened state I struggle to control it. I start to wonder again. A piercing and shivering thought. That I may have simply followed another spectral ghost into the hollow shell of a ship that may not even be there.
Too late. I’m on the train now and there is no way off. If I’ve been conned then I’ve been conned. If I have followed a siren in here, no longer the captain of my own ship, if I have followed something less than real and it leads me to rocky shores then so be it.
I start to feel desperate and alone. I start to remember the hopelessness of my situation, the hopelessness of the mine I left behind and the dark thoughts that go with it. I start to give up and start to think that if I have wandered haplessly into my own doom then so be it.
I feel like I’ve been crawling, struggling every inch, for a while now. I know I have made little progress but I can, at least, not see the light at the other end of the tunnel and I am now a little warmer. I press my agonized shoulders against the slick metal and dig deep to keep pushing against the pain. My lungs are restrained and I cannot draw in a deep enough breath to satisfy my need for fresh air. My muscles are starved and drowning in carbon dioxide.
‘Not much further, Sam.’ My angel calls to me. She must have found something and just the sound of her voice, as real as I can make it out to be, satisfies my childish fear that she may not be true. I start to push harder and harder and slip further down the tunnel into the bowels of the ship. I can see a glimmer of light. And I can just make out the ebony glow of her mystical hair.
She reaches down the shaft and pulls me close to her. I had forgotten how strong she was. My eyes are relaxed by the sudden light, a dull ambient light at best but light all the same, of the new area as she pulls me through a gap in the tunnel. A great fire must have melted a great hole in it’s side. It was big enough to climb through.