Coffins Without Bodies
18 Mar 2018Namita Pear
"Like the sun through the trees you came to love me, like the leaves off the tree you flew away..."I whisper this to myself, just now, as I open my tablet up and begin to write. Hutton Radio has kept Wade and I company through this leg of our journey, while Lave provided the soundtrack to our Barnard trip; those lyrics above belong to what seemed to be a very old song, musically intertwined with H.G. Wells' classic, The War Of The Worlds. The scene: our protagonist attempting to flee the old nation of England via prehistoric steam-based naval craft, as the Martian war-machines tear apart the scenery... I'm sure plenty of publications have blown the dust off the one and-a-half thousand year work in the wake of our Thargoid resurgence. I'm even more sure they similarly blew the dust off the same articles they wrote when we first discovered them. The song, however, still sticks in my mind during this troubling time for the same reason: those excerpts, and the link I make between them and our non-human threat.
Briefly we passed through Thargoid space, on our way seeing a single Non-Human Signal. Hurtling towards Nebula NGC 7822, though it sits approximately twice as far from the Bubble as the California Nebula we returned from so recently, we have already come across twice as many desolate wrecks as during our entire first expedition; and, more troubling, we have logged multiple distress calls along the way. I know of the rumors that Thargoids can successfully mimic distress signals, but whether alien or human they are threats our unarmed Asp cannot help with... logging them and boosting the coordinates as we go is all we can do.
In this scope comes half of what I really need to write down.
A small group of ships floating in blackness, occasionally speckled against the glare of the Milky Way centre. Their ejection seats are gone or retracted but their canopies are intact. In between and around the dead F63 Condors and single Sidewinder are their parts and wiring, and giant hunks of metal from yet another huge, unrecognizable vessel, what surely must have been their charge. Not a body, escape pod, or cryogenic capsule to be found. Coffins, but no corpses.
On the nearby planet, I found more evidence of whatever disaster had happened: an SRV broken down, almost flattened, a busted capsule with its cargo strewn about. About a kilometer from this, down a canyon, another Condor lay in state, half-embedded inside rock with debris scattered behind it in a line, its condition identical to what I assume are its sisters in orbit. Coffins. Etc.
This is the sight I need to recount. Quietly, I watched Wade pick up the most precious of its tonnage as he learned the Scorpion's controls, both of us unaware of an irony yet to manifest.
Approximately an hour ago we warped into the peculiar system of HIP 1080, the sun a massive B-class star, blue and incredible in the airless sky of this goddamned rock. Around it lay huge gas-giants with a dim glow and red dwarfs of similar size and color, so that the system center remains orbited by stars and their impostors. Adding several unique, smouldering planets, we agreed it was a place to rest in, and I allowed Wade to scan the entire system out of admiration for its interesting composition before angling towards one of the more massive land-able bodies. On the way, yet another wreck, again with no story to tell other than a large bank of exploration data left behind for us to salvage. I tried not to think about it.
Fifteen minutes ago I crashed our ship.
The rate of climb indicator remained in the deep red as the ground neared. Verity screamed, "Altitude," Wade joining her. "Pitch and hit the boosters!" It was a helpless cry from below me as I responded; the landing gear was already lowered. A scream, from who I do not know, as we impact; the shield obliterates in a fuzzy squeal like tearing atmosphere. I see eight helms in front of me as the G-forces crush me in my seat, the planet having already quintupled the pull my body expects. YIAH is thrown like a pebble with the recoil, smoke billowing into vacuum, the scraggly surface spiraling. Then, time freezes as we do, Asp cancelling our tumble in surreal normality. I feel the stick and throttle move in my hands, the pedals forcing my legs as my copilot takes control.
"GOD DAMN IT, PEAR!" I watch the miniature holographic Explorer rotate, red flashes where the hull was scraping about the ground, until wade forces us up. "THIS IS WHY I NEED TO LEARN HOW TO FLY THIS THING!" I do nothing as he experiments with the gravity, mind fighting harder than my body to not grow sick. We float lazily towards the ground with no input, and as Wade masters the controls we finally glide to a stop in time for the shields to groan into existence.
You've now read the other half of this entry. The damage was, obviously, not fatal, nor crippling. YIAH already wore her decrepit paint with pride, now she wears a hull crumpled in parts like tissue. Wade is furious. It's a miracle he even listed what I broke while I stared back, silent.
Even now, as I write this, I sit in our SRV, grabbing materials (from this thankfully metal-rich planet) to replenish our supplies after "CMDR" Wade Alexander fixes the hull breaches and melds the wires. In an hour or two, when I return and try to sleep, the horror will catch up to me. Right now, there's more things on my mind.
Behind me are all these events, these memories. Witches, ghosts, coffins, aliens, suns, giant clouds of carbon. Things I can put words to.
And I literally don't know what's in front of me.
It'd be poetic if I weren't an "explorer". Or maybe ironic. At this point I think it just comes with the territory.
Next time I'll publish our itinerary. I don't want to look at maps right now. I just want to sit still.