Our focus is narrow. What’s there? What’s there? Adjust and scan. We see. Organism. Alone. Watch.

‘What the…?’ Neela blinked, trying to penetrate the darkness. Nothing. Sit up then. Crack! Her head smacked into something hard and she dropped back down to the supine position to regroup. What was this? How had she got here? Think.

It is awake, it breathes. We are interested.

Neela raised one leg, the other, both arms. She was lying under a parallel surface just a few centimetres from her face. One of the crawl-ways? She pushed up, kicked at it. ‘Shit!’ Solid. She reached as far left as she could, then right. Still there, same thing.

It begins. Focus. Adjust. Sentience brings fear. We are excited.

Ok systematise, start with what happened last. En route from the asteroid belt to Mars base with a cargo of metal ores. All straight so far. Neela groped to scratch an itch on her butt, rolling a little and hitting her face on the overhead surface. It was smooth. Artificial? It felt metallic. What the hell was this? She slid experimentally to her left, hands on the deck. Rock, flat but uneven, better watch out for sharp protrusions.  Shifting along sideways, inching in the dark, looking for light, looking for anything. Explore to survive? Well, it hadn’t come to that yet had it.

There is movement. How does it choose direction? Listen and observe. Fear gives us feeling.

She stopped, trying to check her watch. Time was escaping in the pitch darkness, drifting out of reach, the concrete hooks of recall disintegrating in this unholy night. How long had she been here, a few minutes? Hours? Not likely, she wasn’t hungry. Ok, that’s a parameter or two sorted then so how’s about a factual anchor? The last thing she remembered was – well what? Going into FTL for the home trip? No; they’d still been on sub-light when, when….

Analytic thought processes. Fear delayed. We document. We learn.

….when she’d stowed the cargo from their last excavation. And after that? Neela remembered nothing. Blank. Zilch. She hazarded a guess about going to the mess or crashing in her cabin but this was ‘must have done’ confabulation lacking direct evidence. Storing the cargo was the last clear event Neela could recall so how did she get from there to here, wherever ‘here’ turned out to be?  A macho prank by her crew mates? Spiked her bottle with HypnoSynth? Some joke, she thought, if joke it was.

She called out ‘Hey you bunch of shit-brained bastards! Game’s over, get me outa here!’ Adding ‘I need a pee’ as she began to feel the slight discomfort of an expanding bladder.

Silence. Neela tried again ‘Either get me out or send down some beers and a piss bag!’ Those bastards were watching her and crapping themselves laughing, Neela imagined, forcing her mind to conjure up their raucous hootings. She upped the anti, ‘Get me the crap out of here!’ she yelled. And where the seven-shades was Jace? If he was in on this she was going to take his gonads in both hands and stuff them up his arse for him, never mind that she might need them later if they ever got going on their formal partnering-up situation, frills and all. She forced herself to look into the dark again, to check for anything that might be light, that might be a larger space, that might be a sign that said ‘Please Mind the Gap as you get off the Ride’.

A lifelong cabin-bug, born and bred on deep space freighters, Neela was not claustrophobic and nor was she easy to spook but this was more than a little freaky. She side-stepped her rising anxiety; of course it could just be an unscheduled crew assessment and Flight was renowned for springing surprise evals on upgrade candidates. Shut somebody out of the air lock once and faked the ship being dead in the water to see if the bloke lost it. Bastard! Ok so do it by the book then, let’s go through the routine. Oxygen? Yes. Gravity? Check. Signs of hostiles? No but then the dark was pretty profound so how would she know? Olfactory indicators? Neela sniffed heavily. No stinks but nothing flowery or pleasant either, no evidence of gases, damp, rotting vegetation, smoke. No animal smells. NADA.  Apparently inert as she was still conscious.  Temperature. Well, she could do with her jacket but it wasn’t exactly cold but nor was it too clear where any source of heat might be coming from. Touch: she had already noted the feel of rock and metal and that the two surfaces seemed to run parallel at about 30-40 cms apart but over what distance and which way?  Two meters? Two miles? Two hundred miles? One way? Both ways? She pulled sharply back from that thought, it was too horrific to consider and Neela dismissed it rapidly before it could lodge and discharge its terrifying payload. Sounds then. Neela listened, tried to slow her breathing, partial out the thudding of her heart. She strained to hear whatever was there to be heard but all that came back was the sound of her own blood rushing through her ears. She shouted at different pitches; a high, girlie squeak, a mid range holler and a basso profundo rumble. Nothing. Not even an echo. Dammit, she thought she could hear her own kidneys churning out piss! Neela had been in plenty of caves before and this one had none of the creaks, groans, drips or dribbles that went with caves, not even asteroidal ones. She began to feel dread, that creeping, insidious destroyer of souls, and….

It begins! See the face! See the face! We feel the fear!

…..snapped herself back to her purpose. Communications. ‘Let’s assume I’m still on the ship’ she thought, grasping at the reassurance of pragmatism and reaching for her com-unit. Damn – it was in the back of her belt rig. She struggled to release it, heaving her body upwards as far as she could and stretching her arm down behind to pull the device free of its holster.  Squirming it up to her face, Neela pressed the ‘out’ button and announced ‘When I get back on board you guys had better be armed or you’re dead meat! And that’s after I’ve neutered the lot of you with my bare hands!’. Then she pressed ‘in’ for incoming. There would be silence, they would hold the joke for as long as possible, then they would be laughing, snorting and hooting at the crap they’d scared out of her. ‘What colour are your pants Nee?!’ ‘Pwargh, what a stink! Better get them off before you come in here!’. Then they would open the trap door and let her out. They would let her out.

Hssssssssss

The com-unit crackled and spat its failure to deliver. ‘It’s either bust or I’m out of range’. She pushed some buttons. The unit was functional. ’Which means I’m not on the ship. Which means I’m in the deepest shit ever’ Neela felt her courage begin to lose substance and drift carelessly into the dead air, panic shifting the balance from the cerebral to the visceral. Adrenaline worms wrapped themselves around her gut, squeezing tendrils of acid regurgitation into her throat. She hauled her focus back to the immediate task and her surroundings (‘prison’, whispered her fear).

She  groped for an indication of slope or gradient.

She licked her finger and held it for long moments the short distance above her nose in search of air current.

She kicked at each surface listening for hollows or weaknesses.

She turned her head left and right, seeking just one pixel of light.

She strained to see down beyond her feet.

She slowly, carefully, executed a 180 degree turn to check ‘behind’, counting off her moves and estimating her progress by keeping one outstretched hand in position and rotating around it.

Nothing. No clues. No indication of the size, extent, width, depth, solidity of her cave (catacomb). Or the way out. She was trapped, flat on her back under a layer of god-knows–what that stretched shit-knew how far in crap-knows what direction. The darkness seemed to deepen and the dead, dread, leaden silence burrowed into her head to scream its nihilistic message. Surely somebody knew she was here, they would be searching, scanning. Jace would be rounding up the cargo crew, setting up DNA tracking systems. They would come. They would find her but….

It guesses, it sees its fate, the terror starts. We watch, feel and learn.

….‘How big is this shit hole?’ Neela’s internal voice felt small; the child shut in the electronics gang by giggling mates and left there until her bravado turned to tears; the rookie stevedore caught out on a foolish dash between ships with a near empty oxygen tank.

‘Why am I here?!’ Neela raged at the silence, kicked out at the impenetrable metal above and hammered the rock beneath with her fists. ‘What do you want for shit’s sake?’ The air felt thicker. Neela’s heart thudded against her chest, her breathing short and shallow. Sweat. Was the ceiling closer?  Her throat tightened, what if the oxygen was finite? She had to get out of this (tomb), staying put wasn’t an option so she had to make a decision. But how? How would she know which way to go? Up? Down? Left? Right? Diagonally?  What if the exit was just to her left and she went right? What if there was no exit (from her coffin) at all? ‘I’ll bet there’s hundreds’ Neela tried to conceal her disbelief from herself. She found a canteen token in her top pocket, flicked it at the incarcerating metal above. ‘Whichever side it falls from the perpendicular, that’s my track’. Neela appealed to a deity she had never consulted before as she watched, in the slow motion of fateful circumstance, the token’s turning, turning, twisting progress towards the destination upon which her life might depend. It landed next to her heart. ‘A good omen’ she thought and, gathering a breath that pulled on the roots of her soul, began to follow her left hand on its slow, inching journey towards…

…..Death. We see death. We see the organism and its task. It is moving away from the exit. It will die before it can reach the exit from the other side. Our focus is wide.

….hope.

Neela’s shoulders and elbows bled. No room to turn over and crawl, no space for relief. She had long ago let her bladder empty so that her pants were cold, wet and abrasive against her skin. The soft skin Jace had stroked before loving her with a passion that shook their small cabin. Neela’s eyes were dry of tears, her breath registered only faintly on the cold surface above as she crept painfully on. She began to believe she had known nothing else, her childhood on the big freighters, playing in the red sands of Mars, her first crewing job on the ‘4Ps’ mining circuit – ‘Piss Poor out, Pissed as Parrots on return’!  All delusions, phantoms to be dismissed as distracters from this task, this journey, this challenge she had been set. Neela gritted the teeth she had been grinding, ripped her shirt to make crude bandages for her elbows, forgot about her life before this and crept on. A little south this time. A little further from the exit. But that was irrelevant wasn’t it? The journey was the thing, keeping going, making progress. She smiled to herself, licked her dry lips with a drier tongue and felt invincible.

We have observed, documented. We know. Sentience with analytic thought delays the fear. Prolongs the process. The organism emits rationality and experimentation. Then fear floods the mind. We have perceived profound desolation, mortality, loss of hope and then, most interesting, will, reconstruction. Death is inevitable. The creature must know this but continues its efforts. It is complex. It is exquisite. It enlivens us…

As Neela lay in the deep, black, alien darkness, on the bald surface of a dead planet encased in silent, impervious alloy, a universe observed her trial of spirit. It was interested but impartial. It cared nothing for Neela beyond the feedback she provided to its disembodied trillions drifting insensate among the interstellar gases. Her fear was their sustenance, her dread, their embellishment.

…..We will trap more of these.

Suzanne Conboy-Hill 2013

Assignment for the OU creative writing MA.