Over the Darkened Landscape Read Free

started to fizz and shake, and he was suddenly afraid that some algae had managed to worm its way into the box.
    A few sparks flew, and then with a loud BANG! a bolt of electricity shot out and found the only other power source within the field; his neural input.
    The jolt fried his connections with the input. As the device was intertwined with his speech centers, the shock he suffered caused an immediate loss of his ability to speak, or even to form cognitive thoughts that he could translate into words. As well, the input’s link with the company command vessels went down.
    When the main shock hit him, Simon lost consciousness immediately. His body reacted at the same time, however, much stronger and faster than it had been for some years, as the surge of electricity forced his muscles to override the time-delay implants.
    A sudden, involuntary jerk pulled his right arm in towards his body, which caused the sail on that side to begin collapsing. The force-field generator, while damaged, was still operating, and sensed the fall of the huge solar sail. It immediately cast out a micron-thin force-field fan, propping up the sail until it could again fill out with solar wind.
    In the meantime, Simon’s course had changed.

    “We’ve lost a signal.”
    Dr. Petrone rushed over to the board. “Whose?”
    Karl called up the readout. “Simon Helbrecht. Nothing coming from his input unit as of forty five seconds ago.”
    “Try to coax it back on line. I’ll get Claire to plot his trajectory.”
    Dr. Petrone thrust his body into the slot and pulled himself along the tunnel that connected the tracking station with the ship’s control deck. In his hurry he cracked a hand against one of the grips and then bashed his head against one of the daylight-balanced light panels when he pulled back in pain. Nursing his sore hand he pulled himself along a bit more cautiously. Claire, the ship’s brain, had anticipated the call and had the trajectory projection ready when Dr. Petrone pulled himself into the control deck.
    Captain Galvez and two of her crew were also waiting for him. “We can leave in eight days, Beni,” she told him. “No sooner.”
    He studied the trajectory map and sucked on his sore hand, nervous and angry.

    *

    He couldn’t remember who he was, but that didn’t really bother him. It felt like that was a normal state of affairs.
    Come to think of it, he didn’t know what he was, either. Turning his head slowly, he looked at as much of himself as was possible.
    All he could see was a brown and green mass, lumpy and shifting ever so slowly. And beyond that mass was blackness, punctuated by points of light.

    “Our scans aren’t turning up anything, Captain.” Claire spoke out loud, for the benefit of the two people on board who did not have neural inputs.
    Captain Galvez floated over to her chair and strapped herself in. The rest of the crew did the same. She turned on the pager and spoke. “All hands, strap in for boost to next search zone. Thirty seconds.”
    After the thirty seconds the fusion rockets kicked in, and she was punched back into her form-fitting seat with a force of over three gees. The boost lasted for three minutes, followed by a break of equal length, before an additional two minute boost.
    Then the search continued.

    The first few times that he had felt his throat begin to be blocked he had managed to swallow. Whatever was in there would drop down to his stomach and he would feel comfortable again. But during one lengthy period where his mind was elsewhere, the constriction became too much to swallow away.
    Because he was used to taking breaths far apart from each other, it took a long time to realize he was no longer breathing. By then, his mind had slipped into an almost total fog. What used to be Simon tried one more time to claw to the top of his consciousness, but the well was too deep.
    Still, something of him remained.

    *

    Captain Galvez exited her ship. Ahead of her hung the massive