Hope – Part 2

I promised myself that I wouldn’t let posts here linger any longer. 

I didn’t anticipate my father dying.

I’m writing again but it’s going to be a long time before it feels as fluid and natural as it once did. 

Nothing for it though. Use these skills or lose them. Those are the only choices. 

Hope – Part 2

It all started with a quiet keening. 

The keen was quiet at first. So low that you couldn’t hear it until you had viewed the feed a few times looking for it. Admiral Eylo’ah had done just that, so once the feed reached the thirty second minute of the mobility test, she looked around to see who else had caught it. 

Oddly enough, every pair of eyes that had borne children caught the sound as it started. It was a sound all of them knew and feared. They worked the whole of their lives to make sure they never had to hear it. 

It was a mother’s wail of lament for her lost children. 

Commander Jelts twitched as though someone had whispered into his ear. His arms, enmeshed into the sensor control sleeves that allowed him to move Prometheus’s bulk, were unavailable to try and knock on the side of his helmet. So, he solved the problem in typical male fashion and simply bashed the priceless piece of headgear against his right roll bar. 

He shook his head again, a bull trying to shake loose a fly, then repeated the slam as if more violence would do the trick.

He stopped after the second hard thwack, his head going dead still as Prometheus came to a halt mid-stride. He cocked his head, as if listening to words whispered down a hallway that he could only just make out. 

“Say again Archimedes, I didn’t catch that last transmission.”

He cocked his head again to listen, absentmindedly bringing Prometheus to a balanced standing rest as he focused his whole attention on whatever he was hearing. Seconds stretched into minutes as the group of scientists and Adjunct Willains attempted to contact Jelts with increasing desperation. The communications equipment showed green, the transmissions showed they were getting through, yet Jelts acted as though nothing in the world existed but this mysterious noise he was straining with his whole being to hear. 

“How would I know what..eyyaaaahhHHHHHGGGG.”

Commander Jelts’ screams cut through the feed, amplified a dozen times over due to all the communications equipment that had been cranked to maximum settings during the frantic attempts to hail him. Scientists and engineers moaned in pain as they covered their ears and tried to turn the settings off. 

Things continued to deteriorate from there.

Jelts thrashed in the cockpit, slamming against the ballistic cushion behind him with a mindless determination to escape. His arms and legs, locked into the adaptive sensory equipment they had used to hotwire the ancient robot, thrashed along with the rest of him. 

Prometheus, however, did not thrash along with him.  

Instead of the random spastic motions you would assume given Jelts condition, giant metal hands slapped to either side of the insectoid head while the mid-thoracic pair of arms wrapped around the abdomen. The keening, present during this whole period as a soft background sound, grew in pitch until the coms unit was forcefully dismantled via pipe-wrench by a sobbing engineer whose ears were bleeding.

The sound began to reverberate from the interior bulkheads that sealed Prometheus within the bowels of Archimedes. The wailing redoubled as the front pair of legs fell forward onto their knees while the reverse-jointed pair of back legs did the same. The head pitched back as all four arms flew upwards towards the dome as if in supplication to the heavens as the wailing intensified. 

The occupants of the observation bay were past all attempts to figure out what was happening. They were all kneeling on the floor or sprawled across it with hands shoved against bleeding ears, screaming soundlessly in pain and horror as wave after wave of sound thrashed against them. 

As suddenly as it had started, the wailing stopped. Prometheus sat upon the testing chamber floor, hands still outstretched, reaching up and out as though they could bridge all the years that had passed if they just went far enough. 

All of the data feedbacks and electronic observation panels went dark as Prometheus shut down. No one had given the order for it to do so, but none of them were in a position to do anything other than moan in shock and pain, either. 

Adjunct Willains, to his credit, was the first of the group to gather his wits and attempt to hail Commander Jelts on the regular radio communicator built into the helmet as a backup should the regular systems go down. There was no answer, however. Willains stumbled through the room, hauling the necessary team-members to their feet until he had assembled a team that could go out and manually retrieve the pilot from whatever fate Prometheus had doomed him to. 

Minutes went by as orders were barked and data was analyzed. The enormous maintenance crawler arrived at the unmoving mountain of metal and began hoisting an emergency disembarkation team into place. The commander of the crawler, a squat bulky man with close-cropped white hair and an enormous scar across one eye, was bellowing orders to the scientists as the crawler came into position. 

The team got to work, beginning the sequence of tones and pressure inputs which would alert the Prometheus to disgorge its pilot. After a tense half-minute, they successfully input the ejection commands and the hatch opened. All of the assembled team, including the grizzled veteran who led them, shrieked in protest and horror as the command chair flew to the end of the loading tracks and came to an abrupt halt. As it did, an sheet of reddish grey liquid flew off the Commander and coated those sent to rescue him in sticky gore. 

Jelts had managed to blow the safety catches in his helmet at some point during his torment. The faceplate had been blown clear. What was left of his face was turned towards the rescue crew. His jaw hung slack and was clearly dislocated from the force of his screaming. 

Where he should have had eyes, there were only empty sockets. 

Behind the empty sockets was a hollow cavern that should have held his brain. The team all came to the same gruesome conclusion: They were currently covered in what was left of Commander Jelts’ brain. 

Wailfully, 

The Unsheathed Quill