Jared McDaris

“Fortunato!” reverberated in her head, like a dozen tennis balls bouncing in an industrial-sized wok.

Lorelei stood in statuesque rictus, implacable as a machine; fitting, since she was anywhere from forty-five to sixty-percent machine, depending on personal definition and depth of observation. Her powerfully-hinged feet were perched with sparrow-like balance on a promontory of rough, jagged ice. Her arms, either coated or composed of titanium alloy, were extended like Moses parting the Red Sea, and from each finger erupted blue-white veins of thoroughly amoral electricity: Jove’s own bolts flung out like spring-action spiderwebs, both rigid and alive with fury. Her jaw was set firm as the immotile ice.

Her honey-brown eyes, like pools of ancient amber, were stuck wide open, rusted at the hinges by frozen and now blown-away tears.

At the back of the base of her neck, a single light on her access panel was blinking green. All systems were go.

The lightning from her fingertips stretched all the way out to the extremes of Europa’s atmosphere in manners most terrifying, churning the normally banal firmament into a sulfurous, supersonic, utterly indifferent hell-scape, fully capable of casual genocide. She was a metal tree, the bolts her immense branches, and the apocalyptic storm above her leaves, soaking up life wherever they found it. She had no roots, however. She was standing on ice.

Lorelei had a very lyric disposition whenever she was performing mindless tasks.

Inside her head, gears ticked away. She had a brain, like any mortal might, but Lorelei’s lump of fat and mucus and dendrites was augmented by wires, cogs, and readout. Nestled among the folds of her brain-and-then-some, number-engraved gears were counting down. When they reached their zero, something clicked, something else stopped ticking, and the blinking green light on her access panel stopped blinking. It was solid green now.

In less than a millisecond, the lightning was gone. Lorelei’s fingers contracted like an old arthritic’s, and her petrified eyes ogled at them like strangers. Her very human lips twisted in an ugly amalgam of fury, offense, and horror. An awful compulsion overtook her, to rub at her rusted eyes. She knew it would do no good: she had to oil them first then gently dab them clean with her wash cloth. But despite all logic, the compulsion was there, and it wouldn’t go away.

Was this a human impulse? Or part of her programming? Lorelei was asking herself this sort of question all the time.

Above, though severed from its source, the storm rolled on.

She could see her clearly, like a hologram, standing before her. The space ship captain, attentive and solid as a statue, staring down the planet’s merciless atmosphere with the conviction of an old man staring down his younger, stronger, more violent son. There was no fear on her face; apprehension seemed hidden even from her eyes. The illusion before Lorelei was insubstantial, but the woman it represented was as solid as granite.

Then the illusion shifted like a cloud formation, melting and molding into something else. In a few seconds, a different woman was standing before her.

“Fortunato.”

The name was hissed, a curse more vile than any she might invent. The source of the hiss, she knew, was standing behind her. She refused to turn around, refused to show weakness. Instead, she answered, “Show me the captain again.”

The illusion, as stubborn as its creator, refused to change.

The hiss spoke, “She did this. Not you.” It was a round, warm, dark murmur, a comforting voice. It was a very human voice, she thought, despite the one who employed it. She felt a scaly hand on her right shoulder, the claws making gentle divots in her skin. “Say it,” the voice warmly commanded.

Lorelei wanted to close her eyes, but knew she couldn’t. She didn’t sigh, didn’t take an unnecessarily deep breath. The hiss knew all these tricks, meant to convey a lightness she didn’t feel. Instead, she let a controlled, calm voice answer, “She did this. Not me.”

She could feel him smiling behind her. “You’re more a slave than I am. Remember that.” his other claw appeared on the left side of her vision, holding a small bottle of oil and a newly-washed cloth. She took them and began gently dabbing at her eyes.

Slowly, Carnifex crept into view. His serpentine, fishlike body was hunched over, shrinking to make himself appear smaller than he already was. His left knee, unlike the rest of his green-scaled skin, was brown and bloated, and he hobbled weakly each time he walked on it. His hands were small but strong, though they and their claws were nowhere near as powerful as his massive jaws and the two rows of serrated fangs that filled them. His bulbous blue eyes seemed vacuous and empty as a stockyard beast, but Lorelei knew them to be filled with both deep wisdom and sharp cunning. Carnifex could be as kind and comforting as a father when he chose, but he also had a vicious streak that made her flesh crawl (at least, what flesh she had).

Right now, all of his venom was aimed at the illusion before them. “There were people in that ship,” he explained, redundantly. “You know that, yes?”

“Yes,” she answered, also redundantly. The middle-aged woman standing before her was a study in disharmony. While Lorelei was half-machine, everything was a product of considered design: smooth lines and idealized function blended perfectly with the good gifts of nature. Carnifex, though unique in shape and damaged by time, was beautiful both in his form and his utter primacy on the planet that was unquestionably the mother of himself and his fallen species. In Fortunato, however, the Universe showed its propensity for chaos.

One of her eyes had been replaced with a goggle-like sensor, alternately red or green or black, determined by either its current function or her current mood. Thin, compressed lips hid parti-colored teeth: ivory, gold, onyx, titanium, and even one of tin. Fully half her scalp had been replaced with a bronze sheet, which Lorelei knew hid a layer of blue scales of unknown origin. One ear was coated in gold, the other replaced with a small, stationary radar dish of some kind.

Her neck was actual leather, complete with a zipper at its front. Neither Lorelei nor Carnifex knew what was behind that zipper: Carnifex had attempted to discover the secret once, and paid dearly for his presumption. Her robes, both copper and powder blue, were sewn into the leather throat: presumably, Fortunato never undressed. Her arms were entirely mechanical, but her hands were scaly and clawed, almost identical to Carnifex’. Her legs (what could be seen of them beneath the robes) looked perfectly human, though the bones within had been replaced with titanium rods and gears. Contrary to all this, upon her feet she wore a pair of simple blue slippers: light, functional, and comfortable.

Lorelei looked upon the woman’s face and saw neither sympathy for others nor the desire of it for herself. She saw determination for some unknown goal, something that had been inexplicably hidden from her all her life.

Or had it?

Out of nowhere, Lorelei thought of her thirteenth birthday. Alone together on this Europa, Carnifex had prepared a feast of waxy fruits and sugar bread. Fortunato had been sealed away in her lab for a week, and the two had been left to their own devices. It was never clear which one had been meant to look after the other. Carnifex had been the same size since he was two, and Lorelei was boasting that she would soon be taller than he was. He laughed at this, but she now saw through the lens of history a distant sorrow in his eyes, covered by his crinkled ocular film lids.

Carnifex stood before her, more or less blocking the illusion. “What are you thinking of, Lori?”

Her brown eyes were wide and vacant, lost in the past. “Birthdays.”

Why had she thought of this? In an instant, with the speed of a superior processing unit, she considered her birthdays: fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth. In each, Fortunato had been elsewhere, in each Carnifex had been with her, reminding her that they were the same age for only two more months, before his own birthday would once again make him the elder and the wiser.

He could not read minds (as far as she knew) but Carnifex seemed to know all the same. “You’re going in the wrong direction.”

Before she could quite make sense of Carnifex’ sentence, the illusion stepped around him into plain view. Fortunato’s previously blank face contracted into magnetic fury, and her eyes moved toward the serpent’s back.

This was no longer an illusion.

The old woman’s lips parted, her eye narrowed, and her sensor-lens changed to red as she snarled “Carnifex.”

A hissing sound was heard, more mechanical than biological, and Lorelei’s friend collapsed to the ground.

NASA/JPL-Caltech

The perverse chorus of screams and howls was underscored horribly by wrenching metal, explosive bolts of lightning, and most troublingly: shrieking winds. Had the ship’s oxygen field been compromised? Were they measuring their lives in minutes, or seconds?

Captain Elena Gonzales bestrode the Helm like a Colossus, deviating not one step from her place. All around her, Chaos reigned like an angry and evidently confused god: the type of god who, while searching for his keys in the dust bin for the third time, violently insists that someone must have snuck into his flat and stolen them. Gonzales indulged herself by tugging at her high collar for a second. She took as deep a breath as she could; holding it, thinking for the forty-second time that it seemed irrational to require ladies, especially star-ship captains, to wear corsets.

Well, at least five seconds had passed, and they were not dead. Clearly, the oxygen field of the SS Icarus had not been broken. This could only mean that the banshee-call of the super-stellar winds was so loud, so unearthly immense, that it reverberated through the virtual walls and into the ship itself. Still, being torn to shreds by winds traveling over five-hundred-thousand miles per hour in about ten minutes when they inevitably destroyed the oxygen field was a damn sight better than being torn to shreds by winds traveling over five-hundred-thousand miles per hour right now. All in all, things were looking up.

Captain Gonzales looked up. The crew was running about, pushing things one aught not to push, pulling things one aught not to pull, yanking on things on which one aught not to yank. The cafeteria crewmen, Sponde and Titan, were huddled between the Map Deck and the Solar Telegraph, no doubt murmuring to each other about black cats and broken mirrors; what they were doing on the flight deck in the first place was unclear. Ferris, the First Mate, was running back and forth between two undamaged pieces of equipment, evidently trying to fix what was not broken; or rather, what was not yet broken.

Doctor Andromeda was calm. That was odd. Not odd for Andromeda himself, as he rarely rose above a seethe, but he was not the man Gonzales counted on for courageous sangfroid under duress. That man, Daedalus “Deuce” Divine, the Pilot, was nowhere to be seen. The Captain allowed herself a brief “Hrmph.”

A full forty-five seconds had now elapsed since the first shock to their hull, and the crew showed no signs of returning to their positions. ‘Well,’ Gonzales thought to herself, ‘this little holiday has gone on quite long enough.’ With a sturdy middle finger, she flipped a switch on the Pilot’s Wheel, and a megaphone sprang down from the ceiling. The Captain indulged herself one final time by clearing her throat, something frowned upon greatly by her childhood vocal instructor.

It should be noted that all three of Captain Gonzales’ aforementioned indulgences had centered around her throat.

“Now then,” she spoke into the megaphone, clearly, articulately, and moderately. One might suspect that, even through a megaphone, the Captain’s equilibrious tone would have failed to arrest the attention of her crew. Fortunately, this was a Gargantua’s Brand Industrial Quality Loudener product, and was well equipped for even super-terrestrial use. The Captain’s voice shook the SS Icarus more bodily than the storms without; so much so that the tumult following her first sentence seemed demure by comparison. As one, the crew stilled themselves and looked to their commanding officer, hands held dutifully over their ears.

Gonzales, her own head ringing with her own voice, in her own ship no less, pressed on stoically. “Ladies and gentlemen, kindly return to your posts. The oxygen field, a product of the good people of Inpenetro’s Encapsulation Emporium, has proven to have withstood the onslaught of this fearsome tempest. We have endured four-hundred-ninety-three nights’ travel to reach the surface of Europa, and I should be sorely disappointed to be frustrated not a day from our goal by something as tedious as my own demise. Please do your captain the favour of ensuring that the beeps continue beeping, the clicks continue clicking, and the supra-attenuative-thrustal-motivators continue… motivating.”

The crew, as a body, continued to stand and stare.

Perhaps more goal-oriented leadership was required. “Mister Sponde,” Gonzales, with the aid of the herculean megaphone, inadvertently bellowed, “please coordinate with Miz Titan and search for Mister Divine. I should dare say we are in need of a pilot at present. First Mate, I would appreciate your company at the Helm.”

She briefly considered shouting “Now” into the already deafening device, but was preempted by a particularly ferocious knock to the ship from without. This seemed to galvanize everyone more effectively than the supra-attenuative-thrustal-motivators, as the entire crew exploded into action once more; and while much of that action seemed largely either for show or self-assurance, the two cafeteria crewmen were indeed moving in a specific trajectory, and the Mate was indeed gravitating toward the Helm.

After wisely returning the megaphone to its perch above, the Captain shouted, “First Mate, what do you think of the Wheel?”

Ferris, a slender and fairly pretty sort of idiot, dutifully examined the Wheel. “It’s spinning all over the place,” he answered. His response was drowned out by the tempestuous howling of the stellar winds, but Gonzales knew her second-in-command-if-in-name-only well enough that she could grasp the tenor of his speech.

“Kindly arrest the Wheel,” she riposted, and without waiting for a reply, she began striding confidently toward Doctor Andromeda. A few seconds later, she was rewarded with a high-pitched yelp and the unmistakable thud of the Mate once again being thrown bodily to the floor. It was something of a habit with the boy, and probably his most endearing quality.

Andromeda paid no attention as she grew closer. “You seem remarkably calm,” she offered with no preamble, “especially in light of recent developments.”

Silence.

With her usual caution, balanced with her usual forthrightness, she reached out and tapped the short, solid man on his barely balding pate.

“Hm?”

“I said, you seem remarkably calm under the circumstances.”

Andromeda seemed to be waking from a dream. “Sir, uh… Circumstances?”

Gonzales pursed her lips in guarded skepticism. “Doctor Andromeda,” she began, a not so subtle emphasis on the man’s title, “did you happen to notice the stellar storm that is threatening to tear my ship apart?”

“Storm?”

“Doctor Andromeda,” again, with even less subtlety, “would you mind awfully, taking a brief hiatus from your meditations and looking about?”

“What? What’s wrong?”

After a moment’s consideration, the Captain chose not to sink to the level of sarcasm. “Our ship is under attack from unanticipated forces.”

The Doctor shook his head, his eyes still distant. “Who could predict or control the maelstroms of Europa?”

“Exactly my point, Doctor. Who could?”

At last, Andromeda seemed to realize where he was. He looked into the Captain’s eyes, as a clever dog being asked to provide a new alternative to String Theory. That is, confusedly. “What do you mean?”

“Well Doctor, seeing as you are the acting president of a Project whose sole responsibility was the observation of the moon Europa with an eye towards human habitation, one might justifiably draw the conclusion, if you’ll pardon my allusion to your own poetry, that you might be expected to predict if not control these maelstroms of Europa.”

The Doctor shook his head. He was out of his depth, much like a seagull in an oubliette. “It’s Fortune…” he answered, perhaps to himself. “It’s all Fortune.”

Gonzales allowed herself an unnecessary exhalation before concluding. “Your unprecedented superstition is less than conciliatory, Doctor Andromeda. Now tell me, are you at all familiar with the Inpenetro oxygen field?”

She couldn’t help suspecting that this question was purely academic, and the Doctor’s hypnotized silence confirmed her suspicions in short order.

The Captain sighed. The Captain never sighed. This was a bad sign. The fact that the sigh was quickly swallowed up by ship-rocking, cacophonous, thundering howls and screeches, unlikely to be heard by anyone other than the out-to-lunch Doctor, seemed particularly portentous.

Unbeknownst to the Gonzales, however, was that the bizarre and as-yet-unknown physics of super-terrestrial sound-waves, combined with the as-testified unpredictable nature of the Europa’s impending atmosphere, had managed to carry her sigh around the interior of the Flight Deck, where it circled several times and (much like a feather) whispered just past the ear of First Mate Ferris, who had only now managed to get the Wheel under relative control. Just as he had gotten his feet securely into a position echoing someone of greater authority than himself, the thoroughly unimpressed sigh brushed by his head.

“What was that?” he asked no one in particular.

At that exact moment, a sound like the cracking of Jupiter’s femur resounded through the SS Icarus. In a manner of less than two seconds, everything that defined what was outside the Icarus and everything that defined what was inside the Icarus, ceased to be.

Gonzales tightened her jaw. As the Captain, this was all ultimately her fault, and she was grateful that the mindless abandon of her crew would keep them from judging her too harshly, during these last few milliseconds that they were capable of judging anything at all.

In those final instants, before everything that defined what was outside her head and everything that defined what was inside her head ceased to be, Captain Gonzales heard a solid baritone shout out something.

It seemed to her that the voice shouted, “Fortunato!”

And then it was over.