The state of starvation wasn’t a big deal anymore. Like a rat chewin’ on the inside of his wriggly ribs. Hunger. It was frantic and hollow, but it was normal now.
He sank down in the pilot’s chair, the curved dais of the Pushkin. The ship was a rusty ol’ freighter held together by patches of good intentions. Stubborn Russian engineering.
The ship’s life support was alright, but the ration lockers had been blank for… God knows how many days.
Now Ivan was at his game. A swirl of movement, hands mashing across the cockpit controls. Course correction: cabin light blinked ON and OFF, and a control box voiced ‘STABLE’. Fingers ran erratically over the topside of the flick panels and then the underbelly of the cockpit.
Cockpit glowed like a damn Christmas tree. Beaming and blazing. He didn’t remember how it all worked anymore, or where he learned it. Ivan’s mind was eaten by radiation, malign holes in the brain. He was razor sure of that.
But now that… that damn JOLT struck him when he least expected it. And he fell. He was falling… And all was blurry. It was like being stabbed by a dagger, right down the guts.
Fucking hell. Stay focused, stay up, stay up! And then Ivan was back in control again. On the floor, yowling.
Ivan’s stomach was eating itself out. The fucking hunger rat.
He had no choice but to crawl across the floor to the sparse provisions he had. Five crates of vodka, he’d thought—back at the station—were more important than getting enough food rations. Quickly he ran out of soylent-grade packages, and he was down to being alone with bottles of 40% liquid death, realizing how dumb an idea this was. It had calories, yes, but not enough to keep a man living for long.
Pain was like a furnace. Vodka could quell it, at least for now. Would he make it to the bottles?
He tried, he damn tried. Slowly but steadily. The world swirled and swerved into colors, into a haze.
Blyat! He was there. He made it.
He could see his face in the glassy, gleaming Stolichnaya. It frightened him. This, whatever it was, didn’t resemble any man, known or unknown. Pale as death, a near-skeleton, a shape whirlpooling in the skewed, gauzy reflection. It made him a tad more bulbous, a tad healthier than he was. He looked like a vampire, or a utoplennik? He couldn’t decide. Something monstrous for sure. Images of old-Earthen stuff, folktales he merely knew from hearsay.
Like through a fog, a vision of a 100 ml shot glass appeared, propelled upward by his balling-up hand. Next, it was being filled with liquid. Next, it ended up in his throat.
The burn, as it is with vodka. The burn was there. It scorched through his throat, sore as it was, this hellish liquid making Ivan sick.
Damn right. That was enough for now.
Around him, light painted the cabin in washed grays. His mind thought about all these years in the Red Eurasian Combine, right before the coral reef struck them with all the hunger, all the rage of unknown intelligence.
Outside the viewport of the cabin, past the solid reinforced spaceglass, there was a pointed blackness.
The Black Sun.
Not a damn star, not really. A holey tear in the textile of the cosmos, a monumental void that slurped starlight and spat out fierce UV radiation.
Black rip with a glowing halo of a saint.
The blackness was drawing Ivan in. The nav systems were half-dead, resuscitated by his vodka-heavy touch—a touch that he didn’t know he had learned. The ship was caught in the gravity well now. It was like a drifting piece of deadwood caught in a batshit maelstrom.
It’d be three hours before gravity powdered the hull like a ground femur. Ten hours or so before his heart stopped from famine, or whatever else. Whichever came first, for fuck’s sake, hard to tell.
He rasped, pushing himself into the captain’s chair again. His legs trembled. He felt lightheaded, untethered from his own body mass. And damn quick now. He had to finish what he started. He couldn’t just sit there waiting for God knows what, and let the hunger rat finish its meal.
But to do what exactly? He only half remembered. It started in the dream, a black mermaid, beautiful like a bat, winged. She was calling him. In his dreams she was, like a muse, like something worthy. His blood needed a bandage like vodka needed a Russian guy. The siren was magnetic. Oh she was. But he knew—or suspected—that it was just a signal, a prop. Some transmission, a gateway noise drug to something else. Bigger, blacker, rounded. Supermassive.
Even now it was calling him. He found his purpose. Middle finger at the colony, the Titan station, the whatever shitty job gave him Combine rubles to spend. This is where the universe held its deepest secrets. The purpose of his birth.
Birth.
Born in Moscow’s slum, down next to the Zoo station, where all kinds of new drugs surfaced. Growing up in a rotten, moldy shack of a flat, half the time no water, no electricity. He recalled how rapidly he got addicted to Alligator-Y, with his dad not even giving a flying fuck about it, abusing cheap ass powervodka day by day, beating his mother to pulp.
His mother. Ah, his mother. The siren’s face was hers. Was that a trick? If it were, it was a good one. It worked. He felt longing. It stirred up his sense of closeness. Of intimacy. The need for it, even at fifty.
He became somebody nonetheless. By some miracle, by virtue of his unduly lofty IQ, he got out of that nightmare. Now a chief station engineer. Titan crew. The Big-T patch on his overalls by his elbow was once upon a time a mark of pride. But lately, not so much. The new meaning was consuming his brain matter. New black sort of meaning.
There it was, again. The sun. Black and pulsing scarcely. Now he could see it, throbbing like a heart. Bending the light, robbing it from everything else.
Him and his rat hunger glancing at it.
But something was different, something was changing, as if it beat faster and faster. The outline of the sun was getting thinner, smaller, now merely a white stroke.
Was it getting larger? The fifteen eye-cavities of his bioocular stared like a fly’s eyes—oh, they looked—for the thing was now transforming, transfixing.
Dark haze, clouds sprouting from the core of blackness, the light unexpectedly dimming, fear striking his veins. Maybe this was all a mistake. Maybe I got myself killed, he thought. Late, too late for that.
A sudden tremor through the ship sent him colliding into the side of the pilot’s seat, whacking his head against the leftward panel. He hit the emergency evasive maneuver lever, and the ship spiraled left and right.
Nothing was in front of the cockpit. Or nothing seemed to be out there in space.
“Danger, danger, fasten your belt!”
But he was down, on his elbows, trying to get himself back up.
“Danger, danger, fasten your belt!”
A big yank struck him, and in the blink of an eye he was in the air. Mid-air, bent like a bow.
Pain, lots of pain. All the light was disappearing. Controls were dying out.
Blackness, blackness all around him. And pain, lots of pain.
His thoughts too entered some barrier, somewhere between life and death, light and day.
“Danger, danger, fasten your belt!”
“Danger, danger, fasten…”
“Danger, dan…”
And there was void.
Pits of Titan is a multi-author, multi-arc collaborative writing effort aimed at producing a kick-ass sci-fi serial that blends horror, action, cyberpunk, metaphysical, mystery, and possibly other genres.
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Oh, there's even a soundtrack!
I'm in it for the long haul. You guys are awesome writers. I can't wait to see where it goes, and thanks for sharing this with us. :)
lordy...i need to work out somewhere to go with one of these three...does it always go in order? im terrible when thwrez a choice!!