When Worlds Collide – Part 3
For the first time in my writing career, I have successfully crafted a cliffhanger! It wasn’t exactly easy, and I had to bully my brain in directions I wouldn’t have thought it would go. Oscar Wilde was quite right when he mentioned that an author is one who has taught his brain to misbehave. I enjoyed the direction the story has taken, and it was an absolute blast to write it in the style I have so far.
I especially like the alien race I’ve crafted. It leaves an extraordinary amount of wiggle room for plot devices, exceptional combat opportunities, and just generally speaking a way to mold it to do what I need it to. The shipboard monster? Courtesy of plant creatures launching blob lasers with a seed in the blob. The blob strikes the ship and burrows to the interior where the seed and blob are pushed through. The blob provides nutrients, and the plant monster begins growing at a crazy pace and fills its size up to the limits of the ceiling. Boom, instant boarding party for each successful hit. Not so great for T. Jefferson Green, but that’s kind of the fun of it. He’s broken, he’s battered, and he’s in significant trouble. But that’s the fun part of writing! Even I don’t know how he’s gonna get out of this, so we get to find out together.
When I first started writing these short stories, I had shortchanged a lot of the potential for action in them. They tended to be far more involved in the description of things, the description of the world, rather than advancing any sort of plot or involving the reader in the story. Don’t get me wrong however, descriptions are incredibly important. One of the best pieces of prose and story ever written was an incredibly involved and descriptive piece of fiction by Patrick Rothfuss. The Name of the Wind was breathtakingly well developed and unique. Yet the way it was revealed was also important. Even though Patrick’s imaginings were put to paper with detail, the pacing of the story and the protagonist was always very crisp. It did not feel like the book ever got bogged down in simply describing the world he inhabited. Description always came at the same time the plot was advancing, or coinciding with the action scenes. That’s a style of writing it would be very intelligent for me to emulate.
With these ideas and concepts in mind, for your reading pleasure
When Worlds Collide – Part 3
Bruised, scared, alone, and unarmed, T. Jefferson Green stared at the warped bulkhead door and frantically considered his options. The creature, whatever it was, struck the door once again. As the sound died away, Jeff Green gathered all the facts he could about his adversary. It survived in deep space, as it was evidently on the gloopy beam which struck his ship. So cold was out as a weapon. Space wasn’t absolute zero, but it was far colder than anything he could cook up on such short notice. Electricity didn’t do a dang thing either, because it had clearly smashed through the forward power cables with no trouble whatsoever, and they carried all the power for the forward sections. Of the things he could make, with the time he had to make them, that left fire as his only weapon. That was going to be a tall order. This was space, and one of the most important things about flying in space was to keep fire away at all costs. The confines of a spaceship was no place to have a fire to deal with.
The next blow to the bulkhead door caved in the top right corner. The thorny nub of the creatures limb slammed into the door where it had bent, and the great weight of the creature and the traction of the thorns in the torn corner began slowly pushing it into the room. Well Green, decision time he thought as he began backing around the reactor towards the rear half of the ship. He was now limited to whatever he could scrounge from the rear of the ship. With a blinding burst of insight, he came upon a plan of action. It was risky, and if he screwed it up, even if he managed to deal with his unwanted guest he would never get home. I’m not exactly spoiled for choice, am I? he thought with a smirk. Clutching his left side, he limped as fast as he could manage towards the rear bulkhead for the engine room. He closed the rear bulkhead door, hoping as he did that this one would take just as long to break through as the other had. He needed the time for the only course of action he had left.
With a grinding howl of stressed metal, the nine meter grotesquely glowing monstrosity gained the reactor room once more. Disrupted from it’s sabotage by the tiny man-thing, it forswore the usual tactics of destruction to pursue the creature who seemed so eager to stop it. It lumbered towards the only other door in the room, unafraid of the time it would take to destroy the door. It was in no hurry, and it possessed no shortage of the strength necessary to destroy the door. Ponderous step after ponderous step brought it to it’s goal. Raising an enormous club of an arm over it head, it began its forceful entrance.
Jeff Green heard the terrible pounding resume on the reactor bulkhead door, and redoubled his efforts in the engineering closet where his fever dream of a plan wasn’t quite going in the fashion he had hoped. The impediment of his injured ribs was more of a challenge than he had anticipated. He had all he needed however, and it was still the best plan that he could come up with. So he simply blocked out the noise of his assailants progress, and continued with his work. Thankfully, grease and coolants for the engine, although not flammable on their own, could combine into a rather nasty and highly flammable liquid which he hoped would be sufficient for the task at hand. The delivery method was the real problem, and was the cause of his current haste. It’s one thing to make a highly flammable liquid, quite another to turn it into a reliable weapon. Trying his best to ignore the pain in his side, he continued his tinkering.
Without emotion, the brooding hulk demolished the next barrier in his path with a slow and steady relentlessness. Showing no signs of triumph, it peeled back yet another insufficient impediment and proceeded to rumble onward towards its prey. Shambling and oozing, it finally gained the rear of the ship. It could feel the life coursing through the tiny prey, feel the heat and energy radiating off the man-things skin. It knew, with a single mindedness that consumed its entire existence, that it had to destroy everything that was different. The prey opened the door to a small room, and limped out towards him. It did not question why the prey did such an odd thing, it simply moved forward to fulfill the only purpose it knew: Destroy.
Jeff Green had done everything that he could think of to make his delivery system as functional as possible. There wasn’t anything else to do but put all his eggs in the basket he had so frantically woven, and leave the rest to fate. Besides Jeff thought with irony it’s not like I have more time. The scraping, squishing hulk had already destroyed the bulkhead that were left between them. He opened the door to the Engineering closet and limped towards the glowing nightmare who was wrecking his beloved vessel. Pointing his right arm at the creatures feet, he pressed the trigger he had clutched in his left hand. With a rumble rising in pitch until it became a screech, the makeshift pressure chamber strapped to his right arm rapidly built up internal stresses. His whole arm shaking, Jeff desperately tried to keep the nozzle pointed towards his slowly advancing doom. Fighting the pain which threatened to overwhelm him, he dropped the switch in his left hand, and pulled the trigger of his improvised potato gun. With a rush of released air and a woomph of propelled liquid, his best hope let loose three gallons of highly flammable liquid in an arcing spray. His arm had shot backwards and upwards, a reaction to the violently loosed pressure, exactly as he had hoped it would. The terror before him let loose a horrendous roar from the various tentacle mouths as it was coated head to foot in the sticky mixture.
With a yell of his own mixed with defiance, hope, fear, and triumph, Jeff brought his left hand out of his pocket, clutching the emergency flare from his survival kit. He slammed it down on his left thigh, breaking the cap which began hissing at once, and the flare nearly blinded him as it flashed into existence. His shout continuing unabated, he flung the flare at the beast, collapsing as he did so around the black hole of pain in his side. He barely even registered as the giant mass of tentacles, green slime, and muscle-like vines all took flame at once. An unearthly shriek nearly deafened him as the monster fell back, beating at itself in an attempt to quench the inferno. As it leaned back, roaring to the ceiling in agony, its gigantic frame began to come apart under the ravenous appetite of the questing flames. As the flytrap like mouth tentacles were consumed, the screaming mercifully quieted. Eventually, as the hulk doubled over backwards and crumpled to the ground, the flames died down. Everything about the monster been eaten by the inferno, all that remained was a brittle and twisted husk of blackened vines.
Gasping, retching in the horrible stench and fumes of the pyre that had once been his opponent, T. Jefferson Green slowly clawed his way to the nearest wall. He had succeeded in felling the giant, but he had a long way to go before he was safe. If he couldn’t get back power to the forward section of his darling, he ran the real risk of striking the walls of the Loop tunnel. Surviving a titanic battle with a creature out of his worst nightmares, only to be instantly vaporized because of a lack of power seemed a terrible waste of a good story. Besides, he was the only one who could describe the insanity of what had happened to Miqdash. Someone had to warn humanity of the terror that was coming. He only hoped his warning would give all of us enough time. He eyed the smoldering remains on his engine room floor, and a chill crept deep within him as he realized that humanity wasn’t equipped to fight this foe.
To be continued…
Justin
