All Will Be Quiet Again
The next aberration spell stretched past all Kay’s estimates. I took stock. Rust had it the roughest. He’d been clawing at his prosthesis before, but now he was actively trying to get rid of his right arm. He rolled on the ground, aiming to smash the artificial limb against the rock. The antiquated fixture in his joint had no neural link and was unaffected, but the uniform on his shoulder was soaked with serous fluid, even his cells rejecting the implant. Worse still, his frantic squirming jeopardized the cargo.
A few paces ahead, Lance kept crawling up the slope. Down on his elbows and knees, he inched forward, eyes on the ground beneath him. A torn piece of his breastplate left a plowed mark in his wake. He had cut himself badly in one gust, slicing through armour to open a gash across his chest. There was no blood—a fortunate effect. But Kay had been right, it was a bad idea to bring a plasma knife into the Open.
Kay fared the best of them all, her training showing. She waited out the squall sitting cross-legged on the ground. Her fingers danced on the aberrascope in an anchoring reflex, the trick I never mastered myself. She was shaking, and perspiration misted her brow, but at least she no longer tried to assault me.
“Damn planet,” Lance was muttering, making another fumbling lurch. “Damn, damn planet.”
All around us, the landscape breathed and bobbed in quiet waves. The endless carpet of violet grass-like growth undulated as if alive, extending stalks of flimsy feelers that reached for the pale yellow sky. Here and there, a white horn of a flower noiselessly unwrapped itself to ooze beads of sticky nectar. The air, saturated with familiar fragrances of sweet almond and lemongrass, felt crisp and invigorating. All around the valley, at disconcertingly regular intervals, dark branchless stubs blew flakes of fluff, and the breeze carried them up the slope towards the mountains. A light snow on a deceptively calm hillside. A silent picture in an audacious colour palette.
In the distance, on the wall of basalt columns, a walkable ledge was outlined in a purple line of vegetation. An almost straight line shooting up to the shelf. Three klicks to go, no more.
Lance was beginning to tire, his crawl faltering, until he lifted his right leg and couldn’t place it down. It hovered, trembling in the air as if there was suddenly no ground for it to land on. His back shook with tension. Behind him, Rust had lost his tussle with the prosthesis and just lay there, head turned away from the mechanic limb, spine arching around the egg in its cushioned case. The hauler began to sob.
“I can’t do it, Brook,” he managed between tearful groans, so out of place in this soundless valley. “Please! I can’t do it anymore.”
“Brook is dead,” Kay said in her new resigned, cold manner. “We left his body in the grove five klicks from here.” She stared at me with hatred, fingers on her instrument. Her fingernails were blue, the effect she had been fighting since leaving the camp.
I spoke to Rust, ignoring Kay’s drivel, “Hang on. The next normalcy tide is almost here.”
Yet I was succumbing to the effects myself. A draft of unease at first, then an insistent ripple of apprehension, and then the real punch of fear. I turned to look downhill: a searing wave rolled our way. The grass in its wake turned black, the marks of old bonfires leaking from the ground. It took all my willpower not to believe the illusion, to push away the stink of burning and stay put. Running would only make it permanent. I looked uphill, trying to moor myself to reality.
Up the slope, Lance staggered to his feet. He looked around in confusion as if seeing the place for the first time. He spotted Rust still laying on his back, and waddled to give him a hand.
It was harder and harder for me to focus. The tide had engulfed me. The smell of charred grass, the heat, the wisps of smoke were too real to dismiss. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see a yellow flame flickering on the ground. My neck cramped in a weird angle, but I didn’t dare to turn and look. My crewmen startled me, appearing just a few strides away. I held up my hand to stop them from coming closer.
“Don’t waste time,” I rasped, smoke tickling my throat. “I’ll be fine. Go.”
“Let’s go,” Kay echoed, flashing past me without a glance. “We need to cross the valley before the next surge.”
“But the commander—” Lance began, looking at me.
“That’s not him.”
Lance and Rust exchanged a pitying look. Some effects lasted beyond the aberration storm.
“Go,” I repeated, adding an encouraging nod.
Moving my head triggered a coughing fit, and I bent over to ease the spasms. Heat struck my face. I shut my eyes, trying not to look at the cinders under my feet. The heat worsened; perhaps my trousers were already smouldering. I heard Rust adjust his backpack, the straps zapping through the plastic rings: he lingered, reluctant to leave me.
“I’ll catch up,” I wheezed. “Go.”
The rustling of the uniforms against the scorched foliage betrayed their slow departure. I clenched my jaw, trying to ignore the boiling in my boots. The flames weren’t there, in truth, but if I gave in, the burns would be real. My muscles cried from tension. I could do it, I could wait it out. It wasn’t that bad yet. Not as bad as in the grove. Another moment, and the squall would pass. But the moment stretched, and the agony stretched with it. Smoke filled my lungs, hot and abrasive. Damn effects: I’ll suffocate in the fresh air. I’ll drown on land, my immune system flooding my lungs with liquid. I made an effort to straighten, imagine the air I breathed as fresh. It worked for a second. I looked up. Three figures moved at a steady gait, trudging through the sea of eerie feelers that squirmed as if in agony. Another minute, and Kay would reach the base of the rocky ramp. I didn’t watch it happen: the curtain of shimmering heat shrouded my view.
The soles of my boots were catching flame. I could smell the hair on my calf starting to singe. My chest contracted in painful gasps. I tried panting. I tried leaning into the pain like Kay had taught us, but the stinging only got worse. And then, blissfully, the drift changed. I could breathe again—not full chest yet, but the air I sucked into my lungs no longer scorched my windpipe. Traces of aberration must still have been present, pressing on my skull. Unpleasant, but manageable.
I heaved myself up to assess the damage. My shins were red under my trousers but not yet blistered. A feeble stalk reached up to lick my skin, and I noticed it too late to pull away. Its touch was gentle, cooling, and I let it soothe away the ache. It could have been worse. I could have lost consciousness again. There was no excuse to linger: I had to catch up with my crew.
I found them taking a break, sitting on the wider stretch of the ledge with their backs to the basalt wall, having ascended no more than twenty metres. Whatever effects they suffered in the last gust, I saw no new injuries. Lance stared into the void, an exposed blood vessel inside his gash drumming a ragged rhythm. Rust sat with his mouth open, his lips caked with blood. Nobody had any water to spare. My own flask was empty after I had tried to waterboard myself in the damn grove.
“It’s not that bad this time,” I said, flexing my neck for an alleviating crack that didn’t come. “We should use this intermission to make progress.”
“Why do you care?” Kay threw at me angrily.
Rust glowered at her on my behalf. “Just—” he began but lost his indignation half-way, the rest of his phrase lifeless, “—enough already.”
Kay wasn’t as combative now as before. All she did was spit on the ground in detestation. The furry growth that covered the ledge sizzled on contact with her saliva. The planet recoiled from us, like we recoiled from aberrations.
“Let’s go,” I said and lumbered onward.
One by one, my crew scrambled to their feet to resume the ascent. We moved steadily up the natural steps, our boots sinking into the carpeted tiles of purple hexagons. Every rustle blared off the walls. This planet was so quiet. We had brought sounds to it, like we had brought normalcy. Grunts and curses and words cut through it, like the sprinklers cut through its unsettling medium. And just like the Open reacted to normalcy by cranking up the aberrations, the flora resisted the sounds, rising to stifle vibrations. It was losing. Where the carpet thinned out and the hair-like cover retreated to the cracks, loose pebbles creaked under our soles and rattled down the perilous drop. On some stretches, where the ledge shrank to a single column and we had to file along sideways, the tips of our armoured boots scraped the rock, making it scream. Many more grunts and curses to come before this was over.
“How much longer?” Rust asked, halting to mop his brow with the sleeve of his good arm. The backpack he was hauling swung dangerously over the precipice.
“Six, seven minutes,” Kay said, stroking the raised bands that forecasted the change in the prevailing field. She looked up. “And at least eight hundred metres.”
I followed her gaze to the grey shelf. She had chosen a good spot to deploy the egg: a platform wide enough to put the mooring in, with a solid shielding from one side to reflect the field and an excellent vantage point to cover at least fifty square kilometres. A new pocket of stable normalcy. A bubble our people could live in—if we could reach that shelf.
The next surge came unannounced, Kay’s prediction wrong this time. I looked over my shoulder, past Kay’s suddenly stiffened figure and saw Lance doubling over, gasping in pain. Blood seeped from the gash in his chest, the lucky cauterization reverted by some new effect that hit him. The terrace we stood on was too narrow for panicked trashing. Before Rust faced his own battle, he managed to reach out to Lance and prop him with his good shoulder. They stood now, supporting each other like two makeshift construction beams. Rust’s foot was an inch away from the drop.
Kay stood frozen, her skin ghost-white, lips bloodless. She stared at me, but her bulging eyes were glazed over. Arms pressed to her sides, she muttered something unintelligible. I called out her name, but her muttering only got louder. I called again to the same effect, but at least I understood what she was saying. That’s not Brook. Brook was dead. She was under the spell again.
“Kay,” I said. “Your anchor! Get a grip on yourself.”
One of her hands slipped to the aberrascope and found the tactile display.
“That’s right.” I watched her brow relax. “Now, turn around and guide Rust away from the precipice. Protect the cargo.”
The effects were getting to me now: I could sense the suffocating flood reaching me. But as I gritted my teeth, fighting the current, Kay seemed to regain control. She turned around, grabbed Rust’s robotic hand, and tugged him hard, away from the drop. The men slumped against the wall. I, too, fell to my knees. My fingers sank into the crack between the hexagons and felt embers. Real blisters formed on my palms. The only way to fight the effects was to hold on to what was real. Crushed stones, not red-hot coals. Before I shut my eyes, I saw Kay watching me with contempt.
When, after what seemed like hours of slow roasting, the surge ended and I came around, I was alone. My crew did the right thing leaving me behind. I looked up, picking out two green-clad figures among grey rock almost at the altitude of the shelf. One sat, sprawled, legs handing over the ledge, and the slender one stood further ahead, embracing a solitary column. Kay and Rust; the way Lance’s chest had bled, he wasn’t likely to reach that far. I looked down, dreading to find his body, but only the silent lake of lilac flora lulled at the foothills.
I checked the damage the last surge had caused. Both my hands were burned, fingers puffy and unbending. My face felt tender when I winced; I didn’t risk touching it. The uniform on the right side of my body, the side unprotected by the basalt wall, was stuck to my skin in wet patches. I did not want to see what was happening under the fabric. Some effects, if left unacknowledged, could be reverted in the next storm. Didn’t I recover fully after the grove? Flinching in pain, I struggled upright. Movement tore the skin under my trousers, and I bit down on a moan and tasted blood. It could have been worse. I could have rolled over the edge and smashed my skull. Eyes on the next hexagon, I pressed on with the climb.
Eventually, I found what was left of my crew. If Rust was still alive, he showed few signs of it. His prosthetic hand below the wrist was gone, the joint mechanism crushed, the protective plating shattered and the rods inside twisted. The flesh arm and both his legs were swollen into grotesque sausages. He wasn’t wearing his backpack. Even Kay had given up on him and taken over the cargo. I stepped around his bloated form to check on my tech.
The terrace she had climbed onto was a challenge to reach. From where I stopped to assess her state, Kay didn’t look more injured than before, but her eyes were shut. Slumped against the rock, she had wedged herself in the gap between the column and the wall, the precious backpack propped against her hip.
“You won,” she said, reacting to the sound of my shuffling footsteps. “You can have your stupid planet. You won.”
“We didn’t win yet,” I said. She looked unnaturally pale with sickly yellow around the eyes. Perhaps there were more effects plaguing her: something subtle, like iron leaving her bloodstream or her own body destroying her red blood cells. “Get up and finish the job.”
She chuckled weakly. “That’s what Brook would have said. You’re a good imitation.”
“I am not an imitation.”
“Of course you are. Everything in this hell is an effect.”
“You’re delirious if you insist I’m not real.”
Kay chuckled again. “Oh, you’re real. That’s the problem. The visions aren’t real, but the effects are.”
I looked down at the black stains on my uniform and coughed out a laugh. An effect, affected by effects. “Whose effect am I, then?”
“I don’t know. Brook’s?”
A fleeting breeze crept down from the mountains and brought a hint of relief to my burning cheeks.
“All right,” I said, straightening. I could not fight her effects for her. “You got me. I’m Brook’s body taken over by the planet. And it tells you to get up and deliver the cargo.”
Her face fell, as if my mock confirmation triggered an avalanche of desperation, and her body began shutting down.
“Kay!” I shouted, lunging forward. Even if I stretched, I could only reach her foot. “Don’t give up, Kay. Fight it!”
Her fingers crept to the aberrascope and found a prominent dip in the forecast. A sigh later, she opened her eyes.
“That’s better,” I said.
I, myself, didn’t feel too good. Something snapped in my chest, sending a stab of intense pain through my insides. A collapsed lung? I bent down, putting my wrists against my thighs to take pressure off my chest. All my blisters throbbed in unison, outlining the extent of the damage: perhaps a third of my body was burnt. I leaned against the terrace, wincing at the contact, and waited for the blur to clear.
Moaning, Kay extracted herself from the crevice. Her right arm hung helpless when she tried to adjust the backpack, centering the bulge of the egg between her shoulder blades.
“Fine,” she said with a tired sigh. “One last push.”
I tried following her, creeping forward with my sore shoulder dragging against the rock, but after just a few strides, I stumbled and sank to my knees. I tried grabbing a handhold, but my fingers scraped the wall in vain, leaving bits of skin on the smooth surface. The view before my eyes darkened, and for a while, I crawled, sightless. Kay moved faster than I could ever pull off in my in-and-out state: by the time I reached the platform, she had the mooring spread out, the adhesives already curing. The haphazard arrangement of the anchorage looked like a proper nest. Not long now. The last terrace was too high for me to step over. I fell forward and landed on my chest, kicking the air in a weak attempt to push myself further up. The effort cost me another blackout.
When the darkness before my eyes cleared at last, I found myself still on my belly, feet hanging from the ledge. I laboured to turn my head, looking for Kay. She sat not far from me, slouched against the wall. Alive still, and awake. Behind her, in the wreath of armoured rods and safety clips, lay a single white egg—the normalization capsule. The protective foil was removed, and a ghostly message across the shell blinked a single word: Initializing.
“How long?” I asked. Speaking dislodged a blockage in my chest. I coughed up something sticky, swallowed it, and felt better.
“Four minutes.”
I rolled onto my side. Four more minutes, and I could rest. Ignoring the protesting scream of my skin, I wedged an arm under my belly to lever myself up. Kay watched me struggle into a sitting position, a look of puzzlement and revulsion on her gaunt face.
“There’s one thing I don’t understand,” she said when I finally found a pose I could bear. “Why are you helping us?”
That again. “You know why. We need to find a way to coexist.”
My answer invoked a weary chuckle. “That’s what Brook would have said.” She shook her head slowly, wincing from the movement. “It shouldn’t surprise me. Aberrations materialize what we think.” Her accusations were getting old, but weren’t my flames equally bogus? “But I still don’t get why. Feeble as it is, everything on this planet wants to get rid of us, turning our own biology against us. Why suddenly cheer for us to succeed?”
I winced. What could another speech change? I tried anyway. “Because we’re not going anywhere. Yes, it was a mistake to come here, but what’s done is done. We can’t tame a place so alien, so we have to adapt, not escalate. The normalcy sprinklers were vital at first, but that solution can’t be permanent. They’re unreliable even inside the camp’s perimeter. The field ripples all over the place and leaks out into the Open. The refraction is too high. The bands are overlapping, making the storms unpredictable. And the egg is a good design. It will create a hard boundary. It will keep the two fields separate. We’ll be safe.”
“We’ll be safe,” Kay repeated as if arguing.
I stared at her. A shadow of a new emotion crossed her brow. Pity, not hatred.
“You’ll be locked here,” she said softly, “in concentrated normalcy. You’ll die.”
She was beyond reasoning with. But she would see. Any minute now, the capsule would activate, deploying a concentric series of fields. The outermost layer would act as an insulating membrane, impenetrable for mechanical waves. Everything inside—the foothills of these mountains, the valley, the camp—would be sterilized by normalcy. An area swept free of the planet’s impact. A piece of land carved out, its native ecosystem eradicated so humans could thrive. The innermost layer of the generated field would be the closest conditions to home. Kay would be able to think straight again. She would see that this was the only way.
She didn’t look good. Eyes fluttered under her ashen eyelids. The aberrascope, her lifeline to sanity, slid out of her rigid hand. Her lips were blue. Cyan on grey, another chromatic displacement so typical on this planet.
“Look,” those lips moved, “at the readouts.”
I could barely make out the words. Her claw of a hand nudged the instrument in my direction. The tactile display tilted, hard shadows outlining a prominent spike in the unfavourable field. This very minute, the aberration storm was raging. I felt fine.
“We need this,” I breathed out, having nothing better to say. Even if I wasn’t he who fell in that grove, we both would be better for it. We could finally rest.
I bent over to put my shoulder on the ground. I could still see the egg with its status message blinking. Any moment now, the fusion reactor inside the capsule would come to life. Normalcy would spread in one brutal, cleansing wave, its devastation too total for aberration-dependent biome to register. It would be quick. Not necessarily painless, but quick. And after that, all would be quiet again.