X67 Marceline

By Simon Carter

With X67 Marceline Simon Carter, delivers us an exciting adventure of epic proportions as Castaway meets Aliens in vivid literature form.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon Carter
• Release date: Sep 3, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463527375

Simon Carter

A business analyst by day, an electronic music producer and author by night... That's when the dreams start to come alive!

Book preview

X67 MARCELINE

Simon Carter

Table of Contents

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER ONE

I awoke to the sound of hissing. It was long and slow, an infernal noise that punctured my ear drums and ran along my spine. All around me was the faint glow of throbbing lights, red flashes that shot across the dark. Like waking from a dream in an unfamiliar room, it took time for my mind to gather its bearings. As my eyes adjusted to the strobe light, my body lurched upward instinctively. Suddenly I was bent over double, a thick and viscous liquid pouring from my mouth. It tasted like stale, ice cold gelatine, the clear mucus clogging my throat and nostrils. With my fingers I reached into my gullet, clearing my airway of the ooze; and then, with a deep gasp of air, I realised where I was. There I sat in a cold bath of liquid, my body shivering and convulsing.

Awaking from cryosleep was rarely pleasant; I had only experienced it twice before. Both times I vowed would be my last, but unfortunately I had no choice in the matter. The sleep was much like giving birth to ones self, complete with the slapping and pinching of skin. Breathing felt uncomfortably new, sight was painful and hearing was like swimming through mud. Every muscle ached, every pore numb and heavy. You felt sick, lifeless and dumb, stripped of your basic faculties. So it was with some effort that I shuddered back to life, shuffling my naked body out of the rubbery pod. I slumbered there on the floor for a moment, whispering to myself to calm down my heartbeat, my pod looming above me like a porcelain coffin. The emergency light blinked across my cold flesh, the hiss becoming louder. I was on board Cargo Vessel V588, a commercial ship designed for long distance space flight and mineral retrieval.

Like a baby giraffe, I raised my quivering knees upright. Each step was pained, clumsy, my brain teaching my legs how to walk. Walking like an ape and wincing my eyelids, I peered across the narrow chamber of pods. Through red flashes I saw their faces, those of my crew and fellow shipmates. They looked calm, serene, their bodies still floating in their tanks. There were thirty three of us now, including a pregnant pilot, an old janitor and a sleazy lawyer sent to keep us on good behaviour. We’d travelled for several years in search of a specific asteroid cluster, a dynamical family named Marceline. We aimed to mine the group for unique deposits, mainly focusing on gold. During the trip we had already suffered two fatalities; one due to an accident while patching up the hull, the other a deliberate and grizzly suicide. Everyone agreed that deep space mining was a most unpleasant line of work; the pay-cheque, however, in an era of great poverty and destitution, was nothing short of miraculous. After our captain had taken his life, I had been appointed second in command; it was not a position I took to very easily. And now, shivering in the flashing dark, I felt less like their captain than ever before.

I stood before the doors of the wardrobe, waiting for the sensor to respond. After taking their sweet time, the doors opened with a clunky yawn, revealing a rack of towels and jumpsuits. There were a few possible reasons I had awoken before the others. The first was that the ship had ejected me due to a lack of resources; it may have considered me, for whatever reason, to be the most expendable of the crew. I found this unlikely as I was younger and better qualified than most of us, especially the poor old janitor. The second was that my own pod had malfunctioned, though its fuzzy and luminous bulbs suggested otherwise. The third possibility, the one that I feared the most, confronted me almost immediately. As I slipped into my jumpsuit, I walked casually over to the glowing cabinet of our pilot. I looked through the dark glass, waiting for the blinking light to illuminate the contents. It shuddered red, her face glowing like a dark sunset.

There she was, glorious and statuesque, her hair spread out in Medusa-like tendrils. Her swollen stomach was covered in thin blue veins, belly button pushed outward. Soon, we thought, she would give birth on board the ship, the kind of event that might make the rest of