WIP excerpt, untitled

“What do you mean, don’t touch the switch?!? Don’t you know when you tell someone not to touch the switch all it does is make them want to touch the switch? It’s like saying ‘don’t look down,’ what kind of help is that? I want to touch the switch, and I know better. It’s like when you yawn - it makes everyone else yawn - so you get the idea that you want to yawn just for fun; a fake yawn, to make everyone else yawn, but then it makes its way around the room and you wind up yawning anyway, for real, because you had to be a funny guy… is that what you’re doing? Is this on purpose?... don’t push the button, don’t touch the switch… yahhhh!” The burly man was red and clenched like a raw knuckle. His face throbbed and shook as he ranted. He faded into incomprehensibility, sputtering, some of what he had said only now being processed.

The rest of us stood in a kind of rapture, speechless, while Mon Capitan squared off against the heat of this anger. None of us knew what would happen, and you could have heard a pin drop in the sudden silence. The men stood only a few strides apart. Mon Capitan was cool and composed, his neat black uniform rolled thrice at the cuffs, boots gleaming. Cats’ eye buttons were his only decoration, and at times like these they lent him a fierce and coiled air of danger. He opened his mouth to speak, and suddenly the ship was heaving in multiple directions. It was like a dog toy shaken by an angry dog, the walls crimping in loud ‘tunks’ of pressure, coolant gasses leaking, sparks sparking from all directions; the emergency lights and sirens filled the silence of the galley with a blue and screaming violence. All of us struggled to stand, most of us failed, and Cookie flew across the room, bounced against the open oven door. He squawked once and was silent. Burly was new on board and no one really knew him, but both he and MC were the only ones that hadn’t moved. The rest of us? We were a mess, bleeding from a variety of wounds and largely unable to move in the random pockets of increasing pressure. My right arm was bent at an unusual angle, though I couldn’t feel anything. I took a minute to stare at it with a sinking stomach. My sides and my face hurt. I think I had bounced my nose off the floor. Then I heard the panel of glass behind the bar crack - a loud smack like two giant hands clapping, once - and looked back up. Cookie wasn’t moving. Burly and MC were in the same attitude that preceded whatever-this-was, their feet firmly planted and eyes locked.

It was as if gravity was stronger for them. Neither had moved, and though MC was moving his mouth, forming words which we all could recognize - the colorfulest of metaphors - the sirens were so loud that his voice was buried somewhere underneath. It was as if he were on a television program being censored for foul language, an overenthusiastic buzzer. If we hadn’t been so busy being nearly dead from space terror and pressure shifts it would have been funny. It’s hard to laugh with a bloody nose and a creaky set of ribs.

Burly started to move forward. I think it was supposed to have been a charge, like in those Viking videos some of the guys liked to watch off-shift, but it came across as the worst kind of lampoon. He moved like he was in molasses, each stride seeming to take forever. The sirens seemed to be providing the rhythm, as if it were some ridiculous dance. MC’s right hand dropped to his side, a wetly dark cylinder forming in his palm. He moved at normal speed, the quivering matter solidifying at once into hard metal and when it stopped moving, a bright beam of blue light shot out its end. It was too bright to look at, though we all tried. We’d never seen him draw down before. A low humming filled the air and the sirens suddenly stopped. There was a scend of sound, a wall of it that made my eyes tear up, through which I thought I heard screaming, and then everything stopped. The shaking, the crimping pressure on the hull, the sirens: all of it, all at once. There was one beat, two, three, of stillness and when I opened my eyes to look at Burly and MC, the former was kneeling, impaled on the bright blue in MC’s hand. It reared above him, a hissing column rising from his back. There was no blood, but Burly’s face was emitting a high pitched whistle. Then the beam turned off, his body fell to the floor, and we had a chance to see the giant hole in the wall that they’d been blocking. MC’s face held no expression whatsoever. He just stood there.

People started to rise from the floor. I rolled onto my side and levered myself off the tile with my left arm. The right hung useless. We all took an internal headcount I think - just the way you do when the stuff hits the fan, I guess… and as one, we turned to stare at the hole. MC thought we were staring at him, at first. He opened his mouth to say something but was interrupted by the glass platen behind the bar. It finally collapsed into a shower of shards, and I heard a groaning from Cookie. At least he was alive.

The hole opened onto space. We could see fluorescing gasses, dim points of light, but there was no roar of outgassing - for some reason, the hole didn’t leak. And cut across the nebular field outside was an immense black shape. It seemed to draw the light in, to somehow be a part of the darkness between the visible stars. Its shape was irregular, bulbous on the left side but bearing hard lines on the right. Hard to describe, really: it was more of an impression of asymmetry. Whenever I looked at it, my eyes seemed to slide off it. It was exceedingly difficult to concentrate and I wondered how much of this was shock and concussion. MC registered the shock on the faces of the crew and turned to look outside. As he turned, the cylinder from which the blue light had sprung began to fade back into nothing, his fingers curling in on the absence.

And that’s how they found us. Staring at what used to be the wall in the mess, frozen by shock into some kind of PTSD diorama, our injuries cradled and bleeding freely. All of us bled from the corners of our eyes, and two newer crew had gone completely blind. The medic drones let us stand where we were, chittering in their high pitched data packets, as they swarmed around us. Burly was buried beneath five or six of them for a few seconds, until the lights on their backs lit a solid red and they moved on. They were the size of housecats, most of them. I barely noticed the two that clamped diagnostics on me: my temple, ribs, and left shin; and I watched but did not feel the third as it sprayed my arm with foam and pulled.