The Void Princess 10: Back and Forth

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Less than half a second after the impulse engines fire, the universe is nothing but pain and static.

I can’t feel my hands. I can’t feel my engines. I roar and roar (LAIKA roars) to the raging sky while my senses fill with white noise and white heat and white pain and am I breathing? I can’t tell. I can’t feel.

Something burns, burns in my brain. The interface chip that shares my thoughts, my feelings, my data with others. My very soul burns in my mind and I can’t see or hear or feel or think anything else; nothing, nothing matters but making it stop.

I land heavily on the ground, roaring; I land heavily in the pilot’s chair, screaming. My numb fingers brush across the control panel looking for something, anything that I can jam into my head and dig out the source, but I can’t get a grip on the rods, I can’t feel them, they just slide out of my fingers and I roar as loudly as I can and I’m hit with a sudden memory.

A memory of Laika roaring, bearing down on me, while I stand there like an idiot in ripped pantaloons and with no EMP shielding, and my soul interface winks out and I’m suddenly completely, totally alone in the universe.

Laika’s control panels are EMP shielded. Meaning his cockpit very likely isn’t.

I reach up with numb, shaking hands and rip off my helmet, and everything is suddenly very, very quiet.

Well, physically it’s quite chaotic. I’m getting thrown into the safety straps left and right. There’s blood on the right side of my head, a piece of my ear torn off by the hasty and very un-regulation helmet removal (I couldn’t work the safety straps). I taste blood, and spit out a small chunk of my own tongue. Gross.

But everything is quiet. I am utterly, completely alone on a planet, far out of the reach of any other living soul.

Which is a lie, of coure; a lie of my own senses. I don’t have time to feel lonely or panicked right now; Laika’s control panel is under my hands, Laika’s thrashing is throwing me about, Laika is in trouble and he needs me right now. I can’t feel him and after months of soul bleed that’s like being half a person, but I know he’s there, I have to believe he’s there, and I need to act.

I reach for the manual override controls, the real manual override controls, and I put him to sleep.

The room immediately stops shaking. I leave the EMP roar on; it’s the only thing protecting me. Now I really am alone, actually alone for the first time in my lifebut that’s fine. It has to be fine. I’ve been trained for this. I’ve been trained to believe that people are still there in the event of an EMP knockout.

So. Just believe that Laika is still there. If he’s going to wake up again, he needs me to be able to do that.

What’s happened is pretty obvious, now that I can think. Something in firing up the impulse engines set this off. Since this clearly wasn’t a known hazard (or Valentina and Laika wouldn’t have been given impulse engines in the first place), it’s probably the Maxwell crystals. They… resonate, somehow?… with the frequency of an impulse engine, like a voice artist shatteing glass with the pitch of her voice. And the blowback from that creates a white noise that overwhelms the soul.

Yeah. That probably makes sense, right? I’m not a physicist. I don’t know anything about impulse engines. But the timing and the circumstances don’t leave too many other explanations. Impulse engines on Venus bad for the soul. Makes dragons and humans unable to function. Deadly, down here.

I eye the levers on Laika’s control panel and thank fate that I’m not as adept at ripping them out as Lyllania was.

I know what you’re thinking. “Oh, Shana, there’s no problem, right? You need the impulse engines to get out of the gravity well, certainly, but you don’t need a soul for that. Just manually pilot Laika out of danger, then shut off the EMP and turn his brain back on. Easy.”

Ha, no.

Manually piloting a dragon is a complicated affair. With Laika asleep, his most basic physiological responses are still in play – if I walk him forward, he will walk without falling over. If I adjust his wings, they’ll adjust. But the complicated moment-to-moment context dependent movements that we all make in life are absent, or at least far less sophisticated in their operation, without a brain to guide them. If I’d grabbed him out in space and had to bring him into a den on a city, I could get us down with minimal bumps and scrapes (although it would be more sensible to disable him and wait for a bigger dragon to physically pilot us in). But I’m under fairly high gravity and in an atmosphere much thicker than I know how to deal with. And above me roar one hundred metre per second winds that would slam us aside and turn us into a smattering of wreckage full of meaty paste. Laika, designed for this, cut through those winds with almost no disturbance on our way down. Me? Soulless, disoriented with soul bleed, at custom controls I barely know how to use? No. Not a chance. Not a fucking chance.

Getting up requires the impulse engines. Getting up also requires Laika being awake. We can’t have both of those things at the same time.

So, we’ll need to be inventive. Maybe Laika can do it with normal thrusters? Maybe he has other tricks up his wingjoints? We’ll have to see. I wait another minute or so in the cold isolation of my own mind, long enough that whatever reaction the impulse engine had set off would surely dissipate. Then, bracing myself in case I’m wrong (who knows how long the white noise will last?) I turn off Laika’s EMP roar.

Yep, I’m wrong. The full force of complete garbage data hits me once more, but this time I know what to expect. I stay coherent enough to pull up my own walls, shielding the important parts of myself from reception, and I can’t see or hear or taste entirely clearly (what’s it doing? How is it even getting in there?), but at least I can think. It’s more like a hundred Laikas trying to directly feed me unreadable raw camera data and less like my soul being consumed.

Annoyed, I push back at it. Just a loud blast of irritation into the void.

And it.

It stops.

Suddenly, my mind is my own again. And this is worse than an EMP blast, because it’s one thing to have your soul blinded and feel no one, and it’s another to have your soul fully capable and know there’s nobody else for certain. Fortunately, I have other things to focus on, like what in the absolute fuck is going on. It stopped? Because of me? Why would my pushback stop it?

And then it starts again and, oh, okay, it was just a coincidence of timing. That happens. A momentary break in whatever is refracting through –

And then it stops again. Very quickly. And I can’t help but notice that that short little blast was exactly as long as my own broadcast.

Hmm.

Okay. The initial wave stopped coincidentally at the right time. And if I’m loud enough, broadcasting from my soul gets and echo, too. That… probably makes sense. I don’t know how impulse engines work, maybe they have the same effect as a really loud soul broadcast. I don’t know how Venus works either, or Maxwell crystals. So, yeah. Impulse engines create some kind of soul noise effect that continues for a while. Loud soul broadcasts can also create an echo. The only reasonable explanation.

Unless.

Unless.

Feeling kind of stupid, I broadcast again. I don’t bother with coherent information, I just make my soul as loud as possible. Two blasts, this time.

It comes back, in the form of garbage data. Two blasts. Same length. And now I’m getting excited, and feeling kind of stupid about that because I’m wrong, I know I’m wrong, I have to be wrong; I’m wrong and I’m going to be so disappointed when I’m finally proven wrong, but. But.

The second echo came back much faster than the first echo did. And Laika and I aren’t moving. And the crystals are presumably not moving either.

If it was an echo of some kind, the timing should be the same. You know what takes a while to respond at first, but responds faster the second time?

Someone who wasn’t expecting a message the first time.

I try something else. One flash, then two flashes, then three.

The wait’s long again, this time. But the response is exactly what I’m hoping for.

Four flashes. Then five.

I send six.

Not an echo. An intelligent response. Someone else is out here, stranded. Calling for help. And whatever transmission system they’re using is absolutely fucked.

Our rescue mission is now two rescue missions.

I wake Laika. He panics for a few seconds, but calms down immediately once he detects my frame of mind. I explain the situation to him in brief, clear concepts.

Do you have a way to find them? I ask.

He answers in the negative. I can’t feel the direction. Can you?

I can’t. And that’s odd in itself. Normally a soul, even the least coherent feral dragon, has directionality to it, but this signal is so mangled that I can’t even tell where it’s coming from or how close it is. It seems to be from multiple places at once. Maybe we’re not getting it from the source, but from multiple signal emitters? I hope not. The stranded person must be very far away if they can’t contact us directly. But why would they have signal emitters set up in the first place? Have we wandered into a much bigger, earlier Venus operation, one too secret for Laika’s group to know about?

The signal feels more dragon than human, I say. Can you get any sense out of it at all?

Laika sends a flash of his own, more coherent information than I did. It’s dragon data, like a docking request; data I can’t understand. He gets a flash in return and waves his tail, agitated. Bad data. Wrong data.

Corrupted in the transmission, or is the dragon too feral, do you think?

Could be either. Very wrong, though.

The sender is coherent enough to have recognised that I was a person, and to have signalled intent to communicate. So he couldn’t be completely feral. If it’s not the transmitter fucking it up somehow, if the bad data is coming from him directly, there must be a lot of it that should still be coherent to Laika. So. It’s probably a transmission issue.

Good. Better a broken transmitter than a broken mind.

Laika sends me the location of the science team’s base; a suggestion. I agree. We absolutely should get back and report what we’ve found. They might have critical information, although I doubt it, since if they knew about any previous groups stranded on Venus they definitely would have said so. But if nothing else, if Laika and I die out here, they deserve to have at least some information about how and why.

Also, there’s a doctor in there. And I’m a lot more injured than I’d like to be.

I swallow a mouthful of blood and straighten out my safety restraints while Laika walks toward the base. The stranded dragon transmits to us at a low level, slightly distracting but not painful, that rather rapidly decreases in strength as we walk.

Until, quite suddenly, it picks up again. Laika and I shove at it, irritated, but the more we walk, the more it increases in strength.

We should turn around, I suggest, pressing my palms to my head as if that can do anything.

No. You are bleeding. If it gets bad again, you can turn me off and walk me there.

I can. But I probably shouldn’t. He’s clearly trying to call us top his location. If we ignore it, he might think we didn’t understand the signal, or that we’ve decided to reject this method of signalling, and trying to figure out another one could be complicated and waste a lot of time. We need to follow, if only to confirm that we understand the signal.

Laika hesitates. Fine. We tag his location, and then we go back.

Alright.

We turn around, and head in the other direction. The signal strength lessens as we walk. Laika and the feral ‘chat’ back and forth, but I can feel the edge of Laika’s frustration and know that the feral’s data isn’t making any more sense.

Then we stop, alarmed. (Laika, Laika stops.) I sit up in my chair and shoot a wordless enquiry.

The response is wary bafflement. He’s not a feral dragon.

No?

He is a feral city.

A city? What?

That doesn’t make sense, I point out. A city doesn’t have a mind to go feral. Are you suggesting it’s a city with a corrupt transmission point or – ?

No. Data is wrong. Response systems are wrong. All wrong on every level; if it was just the transmitters garbling things it would be different. The city is feral.

That’s not possible. If there were enough people on Venus to make a city, we’d know.

How?

He has me there. And a city can’t be feral. The majority population would have to be feral. And humans don’t do that; humans…

But humans aren’t the only people in cities, are they? A horrible thought occurs to me.

An isolated city of dragons? I ask.

I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe the humans are mad?

A population made up of mad humans would die out here. But if a city was established, and the humans did die (as it’s very easy for a human on Venus to do), and the dragons, built to withstand the conditions, survived… the echo chamber of dragon-to-dragon contact would keep them together for awhile. But eventually, the lack of human minds would take its toll. Their minds would degrade.

A dragon city. A feral dragon city. On Venus.

Sounds absurd. But given the circumstances, it’s… terrifyingly possible.

We get going again, this time rather more nervous about the venture. I’m trying to run the numbers, on what the seven humans on this planet (most of whom probably have little experience with dragon psychology) can do to help them. How many are there? How many is too many to handle?

The hot-cold transmission signal leads us around to the other side of the volcano, where something glows blue – Maxwell crystals, scattered around some kind of breach in the side. A crevice carved into the volcano – meteor impact? That happened on planets, right?

Walking inside the crevice is like walking into a geode. The temperature on my hull ticks up a little (Laika’s hull, Laika’s hull) in the light but not enough to cause concern; the crystals only shine faintly despite the temperature, and that’s a puzzle that I don’t have the information to even begin speculating about.

The tunnel heads straight for some time, then turns sharply, and we’re suddenly confronted by a door that is, for a dragon, incredibly small. It’s made of some kind of synthmetal I’m not familiar with, and Laika has to fold his wings down tight and hunch up to fit inside the little airlock. (One point against it being a feral dragon city, unless they’re all smaller than Laika, who’s already really small.)

There are neither lights nor instruments inside the airlock. When the outer door shuts, we’re left in darkness until the airlock cycles. Laika, a being of the void and open skies, does his best not to panic until the inner door opens and we’re confronted with the strangest sight I’ve ever seen in my life.

Princess, Laika says, all his cameras pointed forward, what is this?

Well, I manage, it’s not a dragon or a city.

No. No, it is not.

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