Oceanus: Chapter 17
"Do not infest your mind with beating on The strangeness of this business."-- The Tempest, William Shakespeare.
Chapters 1-5| Chapter 6 |Chapter 7| Chapter 8| Chapter 9|Chapter 10| Chapter 11| Chapter 12|Chapter 13| Chapter 14|Chapter 15|Chapter 16|
Summary of events: Most of Owen’s team have been rescued by Jet and Geraint. Thea has discovered some uncomfortable truths about her father. Balthazar is still aboard the Demeter working out a way to get everyone back on board.
Balthazar stared at the blinking lights on the screen. Uncategorised. He still wasn’t sure what to do about it. Even as a simpleton– as he often referred to himself– he knew that the protocol was to run and get out of there as soon as possible but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Never before in his life had he been faced with tough decisions. “This will be good for you,” his father had said when he informed his parents of his new career. “It will be the making of you.”
Balthazar did not want to be made today but he had to.
He had resolved to bring the shuttles back and everyone on them. As it stood, he was on his own, in space, with nothing but a hallucination for assistance.
“We can bring them all back, clean ‘em up and send them back down?” Liana suggested. She looked up at him, blinking in a way that was beginning to annoy him.
“What if something goes wrong though?” He sensed his own impatience in his voice. He wanted to say “I’m sorry,” but now that the fear of the uncategorised throbbed in his stomach, he couldn’t spare a thought for niceties. Come on Balthazar, he thought.
“What if it does go wrong? You’ve always done things the wrong way because you’re so fucking stupid,” a voice whispered from the shadows of the bridge. “Stop it.” Balthazar said.
Liana spun around in her chair. “What?”
“Not you.”
“They’re all going to die down there and it’s your fault. You’re an idiot who can barely count to ten and you know it.”
Balthazar coughed nervously and turned away from Liana. He stared into the shadows in the corner of the room. It waited for him, smiling in the dark. His eyes met with his tormentor.
“Bugger off,” he said.
It hissed in the black recesses, laughing at him.
“Bugger. Off.” he said again firmly.
It was still laughing at him. “I’m not afraid of you any more. You know that. You can stay if you want but this is the last time I notice, mate.” He turned his back to the shadow.
“What’s going on?”
“Liana, listen. I know you’re a computer system and you appearing as this…” he held out his hands and circled them, “person… it’s just a way of me processing things I can’t really understand. You’re hot and interesting and you hold my attention more than a guidebook could but this is the last thing we do together.” He smiled. “It’s been a pleasure but I don’t need help any more.”
“Are you sure?” she asked.
He nodded, acknowledging the reality of his situation. He looked at his aide and thought about all of the imaginary friends who had sat with him in the classrooms over the years. The imaginary friends that had rubbed his back when he cried on the school steps. The friends who, when he was nine, helped him to make sense of his homework when he had the reading age of a four year old. His parents, on several occasions, had thrust their only son at the feet of various specialists and counsellors. “Selective mute” their notes would say. The little boy would shut down, hiding within himself and unable to hear any calls– no matter how supportive, from his parents. In his head he would have already ran away to be with his friends, off on an adventure. They understood everything and could explain it to him in a way that was manageable. They took the difficult things away.
As he looked at Liana, he smiled and prepared himself to say goodbye to his final imaginary friend. “It’s about time I sorted things out myself from now on.” he said with a sigh. “We’ll go through the shuttle reactivation and I’ll take it from there.” He pulled at his lapels. “You just show me all the buttons, yeah?” He turned to look at the shadow creature. It was gone.
Liana, seeming satisfied, smiled and turned back to the console.
“We could just reactivate them from here. Do you want me to try that?”
“Please, Liana.”
He watched Liana as she tapped away on the keys, bringing countless maps, coordinates and blueprints onto the screen. “Hmm, I might need to drag them out,” she frowned. He studied the symbols and notifications as they appeared, following the lines of the blueprints.
“What about the uncategorised? Will they be able to get on the shuttles?” Balthazar was nervous but instead of doing nothing as was the usual response, he had already imagined an unauthorised boarding scenario including three possible outcomes. Although none were successful, he had been delighted to have worked it out by himself. He knew that he wouldn’t be able to stop it as a one man defence and was prepared to think of something else as he observed Liana zooming in on each shuttle.
“The uncategorised are nowhere near the shuttles. I really wouldn’t worry. It could be an anomaly. I’m sure if they’re supposed to be human, one of the survivors will be able to tell us.”
“Ok.” That reassured him. “Let’s try and bring the shuttles– oh, wait!” He thought for a moment. “What if we can’t get them back down there? It’s better to keep them where they’re useful.”
Liana zoomed in on a shuttle that had three red dots inside it and was positioned on the east of the island. “If this one is manned, do you think it should come up?”
“Yes. Is it stuck, though?”
“Maybe. We could just try contacting them on the emergency channel?”
“Let’s do that.”
Liana tapped away again on the console. “The scanner shows this one is stuck in a rock face but there are three humans on board… and they’re alive.”
Well of course they’re alive, the screen says so, he thought. “Good,” was his final, filtered response. Balthazar pulled the receiver out of its cap and opened a channel, “S.S Demeter to Io do you read me?”
The line buzzed for a while with some minor scraping sounds. “This is the S.S Demeter to Io.” He held his breath for a moment, thinking of the men on the shuttle. They were alive according to the scanners but in what state? “Can I leave this on a loop?” he asked Liana quietly.
She nodded. “Sure.” She tapped a button with one perfectly manicured finger like a twentieth century air hostess flipping the smoking light back on. “It’s on loop now.”
“Can we do the same for Callisto and Europa?” He eyed the location of the other two shuttles on the map. They had no people on board. He noticed that there was a fourth, larger vessel on the island, too.” He pointed to it.
“What’s that one?”
“It says classified. It won’t tell me.”
“Classified? But this is a rescue mission.”
“I’ve tried. honey, but it won’t let me in. I don’t have the security codes. I’m just a computer, remember?” She smiled her lovely Hollywood smile, the kind he’d seen in the vintage cinemas his mother took him to as a child. She was delightful but she wasn’t real.
She was indeed, just a computer. He could bring anyone or anything to life thanks to years of self-isolation. He thought about whether or not that was a sort of superpower– having a powerful imagination. He was able to fantasise and live the difficulties out, solving them in real time. Liana had been vital for helping him come up with a solution but she was happy to handover to Balthazar, as all good friends were.
“Balthazar Swaine. Cabin Steward… and more,” he said to himself.
He was going to rescue the crew and he was going to do it now. Check this out, Dad, he thought. He wished Hamza Swaine was there to see him confidently communicating with the stranded vessels. Given his track record, he did wonder for a moment if anyone would believe him this time.
“Ok, let’s just keep what I said on loop and maybe someone will answer when the weather changes. Is that how things work down there? Interference?”
“Well, there was an Ion storm when they landed down there. It could have jammed some signals or damaged sensors. I don’t know what state the shuttles will be in today but it’s likely that there is some hardware damage. Possibly even from emergency landing. Shuttles on envoy ships aren’t really as robust as the other kinds you find. They’re just A to B ships.”
“Ok, thanks. Is it ready to go now?”
“Yes. I’ve set it up to broadcast across all three communication systems.”
“Ok.” Balthazar took a deep breath. “This is Balthazar Swain of the S.S Demeter. Please respond.”
Balthazar had decided to spend the rest of the day on the bridge in the hope that one shuttle would respond. The Io was the only one with life signs showing. He pinned all of his hopes on her and dozed in the captain’s chair.
Several hours had passed when, half asleep, he thought he heard another voice speaking to him. It was not Liana’s.
“This is Captain Kama piloting the Io,” came a man’s voice through the channel accompanied by crackling and humming. “Who am I speaking to?”
Balthazar leapt out of the chair onto the floor. He clambered back up and clumsily grabbed the receiver. His throat tightened. Thank God he thought. “Captain Kama. This is Cabin Steward Balthazar Swaine. How many men do you have with you?”
“Two, Mr Swaine,” there was a pause, “we have been wedged in a cave for two days.”
“Captain, I would like to propose that we pull you out with the tractor beam.”
There was a pause.
“You will have to redistribute power from the main engine for this, Mr Swaine.”
“I am willing to do that, sir.”
“Ok. The tide seems to be coming in. If I were you, I would wait until it has gone back out before attempting to pull us out.” There was a crackle for a moment. “It’s going to be about six hours from now.”
Chapters 1-5| Chapter 6 |Chapter 7| Chapter 8| Chapter 9|Chapter 10| Chapter 11| Chapter 12|Chapter 13| Chapter 14|Chapter 15|Chapter 16|
I love how Balthazar is growing into his role and growing as a person here