James Scotson - Planets Falling

Banna kneeled to touch his daughter’s cheek. He was sobbing. “Amy? Sweetheart?” She was smiling, gazing at his contorted face with sympathy. His hand passed through her face, his fingers feeling impossibly cold. She spoke to him breathlessly. He could decipher her words — join us . The air around him prickled. His inner ears hummed, buzzed, and then burst in excruciating, exquisite pain. Blood coursed down the sides of his head. The last vision of his life was the steely glow of the shuttle hull crushing him into the dirt.

The shuttle landed gently. Tyrrel readied her rifle, lowering her sight directly at the front door of the shuttle. It opened and a silhouette appeared in the hole. She pulled the trigger and her weapon recoiled — the figure dropped before the sound registered in her head. She ran forward and froze. The body on the gangway was not Melat the pilot. Verat Wilcoxin stared blankly into the swirling mist.

Tyrrel kneeled to feel for Verat’s pulse. Nothing. Then she looked down and noticed blood running down her chest. How did so much of his blood end up on me ? she thought. Realization washed over her mind even as it began to fade. Melat had ditched the rear hatch and shot Tyrrel in the back. How could I be so stupid? As Tyrrel fell on her side, she saw the jet black hatch of the Raven yawning open and Melat’s red hair swaying into a fading blue mist.

Gorian and Iggy burst into the clearing to see the shuttle perched against the Raven’s enormous backdrop. The shuttle’s gangplank was extended and the Raven was shut tight as a corked bottle. Gorian called, “Banna, Tyrrel. All clear?”

No answer. Only the Raven’s vents answered with a distraught hiss of vapor.

“Ig, this can’t be good.”

Iggy was physically incapable of frowning. But his-her slackened face showed deep concern.

They scrambled to the shuttle and found the lifeless bodies of Tyrell and Verat. Verat’s hands were bound with cable and his mouth was taped. Banna was nowhere to be found.

Gorian rushed into the shuttle and checked the logs. The shuttle had landed ten minutes ago. She did the math. Drop preparation was a time-consuming process. It would take additional time to shut down all the safeties. After all, no self-respecting engineer would want a ship in dry dock to drop into infraspace accidently and destroy an entire planet.

Melat was in the vessel trying to convince the HM to allow a drop to occur on a charted world. Gorian imagined the conversation. Are you certain Ms. Melat that you want to override safety protocol 5050? Yes, HM. Do you realize that this will cause a catastrophic singularity in this system? Yes, HM. I authorize it via voice command. Ms. Melat, a voice command will require you to provide a biometric scan. Do you wish to proceed? And so on. Gorian would’ve smiled if it all wasn’t so damn tragic. Verat, dear ass, Verat. Dead on the gangplank. And likely shot by one of us. His mouth was taped shut so he couldn’t make a sardonic comment as he drew his last breath.

Her calculation was complete: Melat needed 30 minutes to initiate the quantum drive.

“Iggy, jump on board. We’ve to get out of here, now.”

Minns and Grey were miserable, sitting in the muck, orbited by a frenzy of hands and snakes. The air was sodden with thick organic haze. They gagged on each breath as the organic suspension in the air condensed in their mouths and lungs creating a dense, mucilaginous sludge. Fen wasn’t faring well. His thick coughs rolled through the fog, arriving in irregular intervals. Their muscles tensed as they anticipated the next tide of hacking.

Grey sighed to himself. “How’d we end up here?”

Minn’s face reddened. “We? Are you kidding? I should shoot you right now. Or maybe I should force you to walk into that wall of death. If we escape this, I’m quitting. They don’t pay me enough to put up with this crap.”

“How is this my fault?” Grey slouched back on his pack. “My father was a great, brilliant man. This is pure evil. Corruption. I have no idea what happened here, but this wasn’t his intent. If I had to gather what happened, he likely created some defense mechanism in the life he planted here — to protect the organisms from tampering. Maybe he gave the creatures the ability to retreat from a threat — a vague intelligence, an ability to communicate. This benign response evolved into something else. I wonder if something on the plateau—” He stopped.

Minns turned to him, “Did something dead manipulate all this? Are you telling me that what we were seeing up there were really dead sentients? And are there demons and angels there too? Did the devil escape on the planet?”

“By mars, I don’t know. Maybe something like that. Do you remember Pinchot Ferris from grade school history, the one who died a recluse? My perspective’s changed. I don’t think she went crazy. My dad thought she was onto something. He believed and I now agree that Ferris discovered a window to an alternate reality and it has something to do with the emergence of life.”

Minns laughed shrilly.

“Seriously. Here’s my hypothesis. Life acts like a powerful quantum drive. It punches a hole in the very fabric of space-time. Perhaps, when we die, a little bit of the coherent energy we produce as living beings sinks down through that hole. Life after death. Water down the drain. Maybe there’s a heaven and hell of sorts. Beyond all of, this.”

Minns sipped some water and wiped her mouth. “This is completely trippy. What you’re saying is that this planet is the equivalent of a giant quantum drive to the afterlife?”

“Yeah, I think so. In a sense, this planet opens a doorway to another universe or something outside of our realm of existence. Who knows? I suspect it’s related to infraspace. Neither Ferris nor dad anticipated that other things, beings might be there. When dad opened the door, he let the dead walk, but also provided an opportunity for other — things — to emerge. Whatever has escaped into our reality has warped the life on this planet. Hence, our dilemma.” He pointed at the undulated wall before them.

“If life’s the doorway, then why hasn’t this emerged on other worlds?”

Grey vaguely felt that he had this conversation before. “Well, let’s see. This planet harbors life on hyperspeed. Dad selected strains of bacteria and plants that mixed with the electrical activity of Nine to intensify the effect. He learned this from Ferris’ writings. Other planets with life are far less likely to generate a big, gaping hole in the fabric of space-time.”

He sat quietly for a moment, deep in thought. His eyes lit up. “But, think about it. Every sentient species we know has a cultural memory of spiritual entities. On old earth in ancient days, gods, fairies, elves, you name it, walked among humans. All of us abandoned these ideas as we developed science and technology. But with technological advances, all of our species trampled the life on our planets into submission. I mean, earth was a complete shithole before the fall happened.”

Minns felt strangely calm. “As we turned down the dimmer on our environments, we lost our spiritual connection.”

Grey sighed. “Exactly. And what we have here is a spiritual connection gone out of control. Humans, even brilliant ones like dad, always mess things up. We just fail every time we dabble.”

They sat in silence watching the maelstrom before them.

It was during this strangely peaceful moment that Fen began screaming.

“Uncle Fen, what’s wrong?” Grey yelled.

The screaming drained into a low moan.

“We’ve to get to him,” Grey fired into the beings. Each curled hand dropped onto the ground, dissolving into the mud. The wall thinned and Grey advanced. Minns fired beside him and a small hole appeared.