Codes and Flukes, No. 3
Posted on March 9th, 2021 by D'bryn Zoë

Zoë muttered, ‘Alright,’ under her breath and held her tricorder up to the surveyor tripod. ‘Just checking your power cell, not trying to throw any sensors out of whack.’

Humid zephyrs skated up the igneous stones from the endless sea, carrying its brackish aroma up the coast to clash with the volcano’s sulphuric breath. A younger Zoë might have ruminated on this eternal handshake of creation and destruction. Instead she thought about how the volcanic flow would provide more and more warmth to the microbiology, which would expand and evolve to something greater. She gazed out onto that empty blue ocean, watched it rush out to meet the pale horizon, and go with it into the unknown.

Her tricorder pinged; diagnostic done. ‘Power’s all good, little guy. You have days of surveying ahead of you before you need a re-up.’

Zoë gave the tripod a pat somewhere between who’s-a-good-boy and atta-kid-now-scram. Its stance faltered on its rocky perch. Her reflex was quick to catch it, and she replanted it on stabler footing, but she had to make the conscious decision to unclench her teeth and get her heart dislodged from her throat. She couldn’t imagine the anxiety of having botched her first away mission on a new planet.

She looked around, hoping to high Whomever that no one had seen. There was a new shadow in her periphery to her right, off in the ocean. Zoë looked, and her heart jumped into her throat again.

Hovering above the gray-blue distance-haze on the horizon was a hulking shape, all a uniform and terrible black that obscured all contour. Zoë could not have hazarded a guess as to its precise dimensions, but it was massive, maybe the size of a starbase. There were no lights, no standard design; it was not a simple cube or dome, but a mess of all shapes clumped together.

Before she could ask herself why no one had seen it, she realized that she knew things about it—or, rather, she remembered things.

Shit, she thought, her hand grasping at the pendant under her shirt. I didn’t take the Light off this morning.

Zoë looked around the beach. There was Commander Wright on the other side of the lava flow; there was Olsen and Ammora farther up the shore toward the mountain’s foothills; there were Captain Harper and Commander Kuari looking on. This was no memory from some unknown person’s head, but it felt the same way as those memories did—the same way you know when you’re dreaming.

‘What are you showing me now?’ she breathed. ‘What is this?’

The things she remembered were not many, and were not of fine detail, nor of great context. This shape was indeed a building, but she knew not who wrought it, nor what one would see inside. All she knew was that there was a black door on a high perch, and what lay within was fear beyond the measure of human comprehension, beyond the imaginable perils of death or torture or captivity or even hallucinatory nightmare.

She recalled her most recent Light memory: Jonas Lamb, the marine thrown dying into space. The fear was not wholly akin but not wholly unlike what Jonas had felt in extremis.

Another shadow in her periphery, this time to her left. She turned. It was her father, his face flushed and perspired, the veins in his forehead and temples throbbing with the strain of his unbridled rage, his eyes bloodshot and wild.

He bellowed, ‘Ungrateful!’

Zoë yelped, lost her balance, and fell to the stones. Her eyes clamped shut on impact, and when she opened them a half-second later he was gone. The building on the horizon was gone. The Light was off.