The Space Whiskey Death Chronicles Read online

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  Particles of dirt clung to them, heavy in number. The workers were smeared with it. Grime and grunge and soil from their seemingly endless toils left them discolored and marked, but they didn’t notice. Or care.

  She bent and dug in, excavating under a weird pinkish sky. She and dozens of others, without end. Same as the hour before that and before that and before that. Dedication didn’t describe it. It was necessity and obsession.

  Below them waited food. Or so the scouts said. It just needed to be retrieved.

  She looked up and wiped her young eyes reflexively. How quickly the intellect takes a back seat to hunger. She knew there was an alien world beyond the hills and ridges that surrounded the canyon they found themselves in. Unknown. Dangerous. Part of her, deep down inside, though always overridden by her job, wanted desperately to explore. It was the same desire her forebears must have felt when they first came to this place.

  But, no. They needed food, because unless some was found soon, they would starve.

  Explore: die. Work: live. Everyone in their place. Quod erat demonstrandum.

  If she or any number of the others had been born differently, perhaps then she could venture out. Instead, life was about digging and shuffling cargo and waiting for the signal that indeed, nourishment had been found.

  Christ, but for who? Those mewling idiot children that she herself couldn’t have, barren as she was? The soldiers who didn’t give two shits for the rest of them – those who were considered expendable?

  She would sneak some food before she got back. Just a nibble. A little something for herself. Heretical, maybe, in this communism, but she was hungry, and it would be a miniscule part of the day’s haul.

  Impulse becoming plot, she continued digging with the others.

  “What do you think it is?” her sister asked beside her. “Some kind of vegetable would be nice. Great, actually. It’s been so long. I don’t know what could possibly grow underground here, but veggies or some oats or grains or something would just be mmm mmm.”

  She didn’t look up. “How should I know? I just do what I’m told, like everyone else.”

  Her sister kept working. “I guess that’s life, huh?”

  “Yeah. Well, fuck this life.”

  “Ugh. You do this every day. I would have thought you’d have given it up by now. Nothing’s going to change just because you complain. You’re better off making the best of things.”

  “You’re a goddamn inspiration.”

  “I have my moments.”

  “I was kidding.”

  Her sister said nothing in response. Silently, they dug, throwing dirt behind them and over them. They pushed farther and deeper.

  Then the scent hit them. It was sweet. Sugary.

  Her sister swooned. “This could be … oh my. This is going to be just absolutely amazing. I can’t believe it. Do you smell that?”

  She couldn’t help but agree.

  It was going to be just delicious. Absolutely delicious. For the kids back at the colony. For the big dumb brutes back at the colony. And, heretically, for herself – that little nibble, she could taste it, the sucrose just a little farther in.

  She dug frantically. So close. So close now.

  She looked over at her sister. She wanted to tell her that she had been right, perhaps, that maybe this was worth all the work and the struggle. She wanted, in some weird way, to congratulate her sister on her optimism.

  Instead, she watched her sister burst into flames.

  A bright beam came slashing down from the sky. Hot even at a distance, it zipped across the landscape and the walls of the valley before finding its target. The fluids in her sister came to a quick boil, popping and sizzling. Her sister was literally cooked, turned to dark carbon outlined by fire.

  She ran, immediately and instinctively.

  Away. Anywhere as long as it was away.

  Because she knew what this meant. The monsters were back.

  She looked up as she moved and saw two titanic aliens towering above them. She saw their feet, the size of a hundred workers, as they tapered up, and how the two legs of each one terminated in a huge trunk. Above that, her eyes failed her.

  How had they not heard them or felt the ground shake?

  How had they not noticed the enormous creatures?

  It didn’t matter at this point, but she was stunned by her own ignorance.

  The beam came down again, carving its way through the dirt and her sisters.

  She was stunned. Panicked.

  Whatever sugary sweetness they were after became a dead idea surrounded by corpses, all unmoving. She kept running. She snatched glimpses of the horror around her. Snatched glimpses of her sisters, turned into smoking husks. Screams stopped as the hot line killed. The physical smell of fear and alert permeated the air. It floated just above the smell of death.

  Why was this happening?

  Given the size of the aliens tormenting them, there was no way she or her sisters could represent anything resembling sustenance. Maybe they were being hunted. Maybe this was extermination.

  Or maybe this was just for fun.

  The why didn’t really matter. Only the colony’s survival did. Even if she detested certain aspects of their lives, they were their lives, and these monstrous creatures had no right to steal that away.

  She had to talk to them. Communicate somehow. Maybe she could reason with them – she certainly couldn’t outrun them or fight them. They were too big. But perhaps they could hear her.

  She turned and ran for the nearest beast’s foot. At that moment, she didn’t have a plan. Her only goal was to climb. To talk to these gigantic beings and plead with them to stop if she could.

  The beam came down again. Too close. It singed her leg as she skittered to the right. In her place, someone else burst into flames.

  She was running so fast that she collided with the titan’s foot. Briefly dazed from the abrupt stop, she took a breath and checked her body. She was fine. She collected herself. She reached forward and examined. The material of the alien appendage was bizarre. Solid, steady, but with a small amount of give and stickiness.

  However strange it was, it was climbable.

  She started up.

  The monster was shifting constantly under her feet, making it difficult and tiring to keep on. But she reminded herself of her goal, and persisted.

  Behind her, around her, and to her sides slid the bright killing beam.

  Still she climbed.

  She made her way over what appeared to be an enormous joint, and could hear the infrastructure of it creak underneath, below the exoskeleton. Above that, another huge joint at the hips, rotating and creaking like the other. Finally, on the trunk of the thing, the surface under her feet calmed. The almost jittery movements of its limbs gave way to more wavy surface shifts and dips.

  She looked up and saw where the trunk widened before coming to a stop. She climbed toward the edge, hoping to spy a neck or head that would lead to either an entryway or access point.

  After an eternity, she reached the shoulder above the beast’s thorax. Off to her side she saw the neck upon which she presumed sat the bulbous, oval command center. Up she climbed again on the smooth and altogether different surface of its throat, stepping lightly, hoping to avoid any kind of sensor that would give her away. She wanted to be in before being found out.

  She found a hole on the side of the thing’s head. Deep and black, it had to be an access point. Or, she reasoned, it had to lead to an access point.

  Victory
was so close. It smelled sweet. Like the sugar.

  Darkness, an absence of light, and another new surface. This close, she allowed herself some enthusiasm. She skittered. She ran down the tunnel. Along the way, she felt wires of some kind. Short outcroppings that were malleable to her touch.

  At the end of the tunnel, she hit a wall. There was no door. No entrance. Nothing that would let her through. Defeat crept into her mind. She kicked with her feet, feeling the obstruction give just a tiny bit. The movement suggested perhaps that there was a door – albeit one she had no hope of passing through.

  She screamed, frustrated, and hit the walls of the tunnel.

  Underneath her, the monster shifted again.

  She was caught off-balance and off-guard. She scrambled.

  But, she wondered, could this thing hear her? Even here?

  She knew she had to be close to the command center, or whatever constituted a command center on this titanic murder machine. The sudden response to her practically confirmed it.

  “Hello?” she cried. “Can you hear me? I’m … I’m from down below. One of those you’ve been trying to kill. Or hunting. Or whatever it is you’re doing.”

  The world shifted again under her feet.

  “Yes, I’m here! I’m right here! I know you can hear me. And I want to know why you’re doing this. I want to know what I can do to make it stop. Diplomacy, for fuck’s sake. Don’t you realize the pain you’re causing? The suffering? What have we ever done to you? Tell me! Explain to me why you need to do this!”

  At the end of the tunnel, a dark shape appeared, blotting out the circle of light.

  A piston of some kind.

  She must have tripped an alarm. Or angered the mighty creature.

  There was a sudden, terrific rise in air pressure. She felt herself being compressed as the piston hammered forward toward her, sealing off the exit.

  The front end of the piston hit her, pinching her legs and arms against the surface of the tunnel, pushing her back into the wall that almost gave but didn’t.

  As the piston retreated, it took with it one of her arms and a leg.

  The circle of light appeared again.

  She screamed in anguish, beating the walls with her remaining limbs.

  “Why are you doing this? Why? What did we ever do to you? We’re just trying to survive. To live. Can’t you see that? We weren’t hurting anyone. Least of all you.”

  Light became dark. The piston reappeared.

  It drove forward. It hit her. It ended her questions.

  Seven-year-old Pinker punched five-year-old Wilson in the shoulder. The act was as near a showing of care as either boy could tolerate without calling the other a sissy.

  Wilson was, at the time, ringing his ear with his pinky finger.

  Pinker asked, “Are you OK?”

  Wilson responded, “Yeah, I’m OK. Something in my ear.”

  Wilson tilted his head and shook it. Then he banged on his skull like a man hitting a soup can to get the last bit of carrot to fall. After a few moments, the small, crushed body of a black ant tumbled out.

  “Holy crap, I can sorta still feel some of the goo from that thing in my head!” Wilson shrieked.

  Pinker covered his mouth and giggled, just shy of uncontrollably, “That’s so nasty, dude!”

  “I’m not sure I want to play this anymore,” Wilson whined, grimacing, again digging the pinky into his ear, twisting his head from side to side to be sure that any ant leftovers were flung out.

  “Don’t be a girl,” Pinker said. He raised the magnifying glass. “There’s a whole bunch still running around.”

  They were all dead.

  Something to do with the ice in the asteroids and the water the ice became.

  Something. Something like that.

  Alex had trouble remembering.

  Snap snap snap.

  Time as a concept meant almost nothing. Clocks were just ticking clicking things that signified when to drill and mine and ship and rest. There were no sunsets. There were no sunrises. Only hours. Endless hours and a black sky pockmarked by endless white pinpricks. Call it bad planning. A total lack of foresight.

  The purifiers started dying, one by one. Food stocks withered. Water supplies drained. Tempers flared and red-lined. What stunned Alex was how fast everything fell apart. Such speed in stark contrast to how soon help could arrive.

  Not just years, but decades. Or more.

  It wasn’t the company’s fault – not entirely. It was theirs, too. Eagerness overriding all.

  Alex dug. Under that weird forever-night sky, into the hard face of the asteroid. His boots were dirty. Work lights shined over the area. Tools glimmered on his belt. His hands cramped under the orange gloves of his suit.

  He dug for his mother. He dug for his father. He dug for his brother. He dug for his sister. For them, four separate holes – four holes, four whispering mounds ready to be curled back to cover four bodies under a black blanket of vacuum.

  His family’s graves would be carved out first, and then the bodies would be dragged from the base. This plan made the most sense to Alex, since it was the low-impact drilling and picking away at rock that presented the bigger task. Moving corpses was a snap thanks to the effectively non-existent gravity.

  What about plots for the others?

  Alex had no idea. Was there strength enough left? Strength, in aggregate, had become a commodity, only to be spent on the most important things. ‘Was there strength enough left’ was the real question. It floated there, hovering, just under ‘Was survival feasible or even worthwhile?’ How much energy could be safely expended on such an ultimately useless gesture as graves?

  Stravinsky’s ‘The Rite of Spring’ was playing on the base’s communication system. It poured out the speakers in Alex’s helmet. Music met only by muscle twitches of annoyance. Had there been any air, the whole asteroid would have throbbed with string and bass and harmony. The instrumental, intended to stave off the madness and paranoia expeditions like these caused, was driving Alex insane.

  Back inside, the computer waited. And so did the bodies.

  Alex couldn’t say for sure that any of the former kin was worth the effort.

  The father had dragged them here. The mother had dutifully obeyed. The brother and sister probably deserved a proper resting-place, but they were complacent rubes as well.

  A better life, they said. A new world, they said. A new start they said.

  One out of three of those had been true.

  Frustration and anger that boiled easily into rage remained.

  The company. The family. The others. They all shared the blame.

  The outer door of the airlock to the squat, white Lego block-looking base closed behind Alex without even a whisper. The interior door opened just as quietly a moment later. No noise except Stravinsky and harsh breaths bouncing around inside a helmet. No whoosh of air to equalize the antechamber because, simply, there was no more air.

  The tank on Alex’s back read forty percent. A few hours left. Probably less with all the digging and exertion.

  Have to check the tanks on the others. Might be able to scavenge something from them. They weren’t using the O2 anymore, anyway. A long shot, but still a shot.

  On the other hand: What would the point be?

  At least the heaters and the lights and the entertainment centers still worked. All those modern comforts ready to be ingested.

  The computer’s stupid smiling face greeted Alex on the command console. Presumably, giving the computer a visage was meant to discourage feelings of isolation – or to encourage feelings of partnership, but if the company had explained this at some point to everyone, it had been lost alongside countless other things in Alex’s memory. Alex couldn’t even recall what the thing was named.

  It pumped a cheerful “Hello, young miner” through the radio of Alex’s helmet. Then it babbled reminders about keeping air tanks fully charged. Then reminders about staying on schedule for the di
g. Finally reminders about the truly and obscenely vast entertainment selection that sat waiting inside the base’s network.

  Not much of a companion, this dumbly grinning machine. Nothing more than a directory of commands and diversions.

  Alex punched the music selection buttons hard, killing Stravinsky, and bringing to life instead Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ – which seemed more fitting for no reason that Alex could identify.

  Alex swam over to the bodies of father, mother, brother and sister. They were stacked like frozen dinners. Floating just slightly above the ground.

  Sister, the smallest and lightest, was on top.

  She was the first to be moved, as per the plan.

  Alex checked the tank on her back. Empty.

  Her face was a blue, frozen gasp. Horrible and sad, but he towed her along easily enough, as Alex had anticipated, by gripping the hoses that connected her lifeless head to the oxygen backpack.

  Alex did not have much to say while pushing her into the grave.

  “Sorry, I guess.”

  Rock curled back in on that dead blue face wrapped in an orange suit.

  Ditto the blue-faced brother, who had been as excited as anyone else.

  Father and mother were a different story. Alex threw them, rather than carrying them, letting weightlessness and inertia bounce their blue face-filled helmets against doorframes. Throwing father so hard against a work light pylon, in fact, that his faceplate cracked and shattered in slow motion. The glass twinkled like the stars did not, here where there was no atmosphere to induce those twinkles.

  Alex panted. He stood on the surface of the asteroid, in front of two empty graves, a parent in each of his gloved hands. Father, who shouldn’t have risked his family. Mother, who should have known better than to let him.

  Did the bodies deserve preservation, in memoriam?

  Decidedly not.

  The jury had reached its decision. The judge had rendered a verdict.

  Alex chucked their bodies into the darkness, aiming for a slowly rotating chunk of rock, hoping to watch the bodies ricochet like pinballs.

  They did, but it was less dramatic than Alex had envisioned.

  Disappointment. But Alex felt no single ‘Sorry’ for either parent.