The Calibray Job, Episode Twelve [Novella]

Things go from bad to worse for the crew of the Sol as they dive deeper into the mysterious underwater facility beneath the waters of Calibray

The Calibray Job is a sci-fi/horror serial. This is the twelfth episode: ‘Blood’.

Previously: The crew of The Sol have arrived on Calibray to steal something from an abandoned science facility. Now, with their ship destroyed and one of the crew dead, they’ve finally made their way into the mysterious facility in the hopes of finding a way off this dying world.

<Previous Episode | Index | Next Episode Coming 30-08-23>

Content Warning: This chapter contains strong violence.

0001.

Avar was shaking, an unfortunate by-product of the bitter cold that had come over the ruins of Harben as the day had worn on.

“Hold it steady,” Lera said, eyes narrowed in concentration as she attempted to solder two disparate halves of the comm array back together. One half rested on a makeshift workbench, the rest of the parts surrounding it, while the other half was held unsteadily by Avar.

“I’m trying,” he said. “It’s really fucking cold.”

“Need me to get you a sweater, honey?” Raea asked. She observed from atop the wreak of one of the houses, still smouldering in the cool air.

Lessons in serialisation: why episodic storytelling rules

“Damn it,” Lera shouted as Avar lost his grip, tearing the freshly soldered metal in two.

“Shit, I’m sorry,” he said.

Lera sighed, “It’s okay, it’s been—a lot.”

“Do you honestly think this is going to work?” Avar asked.

“I have no idea,” she said.

Avar steadied himself with a deep breath before stepping back from the workbench.

“I’m going to take a beat,” he said, “get away from all this.”

Lera nodded, “Sure.”

0002.

Jaark kept his distance from the others as they made their way into the belly of the facility. Its halls, bathed in an impossible green glow, were curved and cylindrical black steel that meandered like veins. He’d kept this position on every job, watching the situation from afar.

Even back in his days as a soldier during the war¹, Jaark knew that the best vantage point of any conflict was as far back as possible. From there you can see everything as though it’s happening on a screen. You can pick out your targets, see threats as they come and, most importantly, get away if you need to.

“They really did just pick up where the king² left off didn’t they,” Sama said. “What’s the point in war if you’re just replacing one evil with another.”

“You can’t honestly think that the Alliance³ is the same?” Jaark replied, stepping forward closer to the others.

“They did this,” Sama said, “not the King or his scientists. This was the Alliance.”

“We don’t even know what this is,” Jaark said.

“And you honestly believe that whatever they were doing here was an accident?”

The further they made their way into the facility, still lit by the dim unbroken green of an unseen light, the more similar the hallways looked. They passed by rooms and small storage lockers with doors designed to blend into the walls of the facility - the only clue to their existence were small metal descriptors fixed above where the handles should be.

“Are we close?” Nera asked the girl holding her hand. Amara nodded as they rounded another corner into a large open room Nera surmised had once been the mess hall. The tables were bare, clean of any sign of life.

Jaark had begun to move back to his usual space at the rear of the group when he noticed a washroom off to the side of the mess.

"I got to piss," he said.

"Piss when we're off-planet," Beck said.

"I don't shoot good when I need to piss."

He stopped, arms and eyebrows raised. Beck sighed, "We'll take five."

Jaark smiled to himself.

"Five, Jaark," Beck repeated.

"Aye, aye, Cap."

0003.

Avar made his way into a clearing between the edge of the town’s ruins and what had once been a forest. He felt his chest tighten from the smoke, coughing violently into his hand. Stumbling, Avar fell forward into a tree his hand held out to catch him. As he steadied himself he realised that the tree was cold. The trunk was smooth, picked clean of bark like a carcass is picked clean of flesh. The tree wasn't just cold, though, it was freezing as though some unseen force had sucked the warmth out of every atom of its makeup. Cold like space, he thought.

He drew back his hand and closed his eyes. He realised this was the first time he'd been alone in almost two days. It was a feeling that crawled over him like a chill. He glanced down at his palm and saw, frozen to his skin by the cold of the tree, three glassy jewels of blood.

He coughed again, aware now of the fluid trying desperately to escape his lungs. A plume of blood sprayed onto the tree, freezing in place. Quickly, he realised that he was bleeding from not just his mouth but from his ears and nose too. Then his vision clouded red at the edges, the world around him slowly turning a crimson monochrome. He was on his knees when he vomited the first torrent of black onto the cracked ground of Calibray. The second he felt rising from deep inside his body like a breath.

Through the blood that poured from his eyes, he could see what was left of his hand, skin melted away to the white of his bones. Strings of muscle and sinew were still in place between his knuckles and fingers and the palm of his hand.

"Please," he called out, his voice muffled by the blood in his throat.

"Are you afraid to die?" a voice asked him. The voice seemed not to be coming from a person but from inside his own mind, as though someone was thinking his thoughts for him.

"Yes," he replied, doubling over and letting out a third geyser of vomit from somewhere inside.

"You are infected," the voice said. "But don't worry, there is a cure."

0004.

Jaark zipped up his pants and made to flush the toilet only to find the mechanism broken. He smiled to himself and closed the lid before turning to the sink. The room was small, especially for a man of Jaark's size. The walls were the same impossibly smooth black steel that made up the rest of the facilities insides. He tried the tap and, to his surprise, a trickle of cold water made its way out. He cupped his hands under the stream and gathered enough to throw over his face.

In the green glow of the room, Jaark looked in the mirror as the blood slowly washed away from his face. He ran his finger over the wound on his forehead, the sting making him wince. He leaned forward to drink from the tap before looking back at the mirror one last time. That was when he saw them. As if he were looking at a memory, they were all gathered in the blackness of the mirror. There, in the void, writhing and bloody, were the faces and bodies of those Jaark had killed. He remembered each of them. The exact face they pulled in the seconds before he took their lives frozen like masks.

Now they were one, an amorphous mess of flesh and bone, twitching together in the darkness. His eyes widened, counting the faces as they merged into one impossible beast. Hundreds of severed limbs, bullet-wounded torsos and eviscerated heads all melted into one before his eyes. He'd clenched his fist without even realising and, with all the strength he had, smashed the glass of the mirror until his knuckles were bloody. Still, in the fragments and shards, he could see them there, moaning and gasping and begging.

0005.

"You think he's gotten lost?" Lera asked.

"Like I could give a fuck," Raea said.

Lera turned from the comm array and gave Raea a look.

"Fine, I'll go look," Raea said.

As she turned from Lera, she saw Avar standing in the smoke.

"There you are," Raea said, "Lera thought you'd died or something."

"Come help me," Lera said.

Avar didn't reply. He stepped out of the smoke, limbs twitching.

"Are you okay?" Raea asked.

She could only make out the whites of his eyes, as though something inside him had been stolen away.

"Need to find the cure," he said. "You are the cure."

He drew his knife from his belt and lunged at Raea, the blade cutting at her cheek.

"Fuck," she shouted, stepping aside just in time to avoid the pointed end piercing her eye.

Lera stumbled backwards into the workbench, knocking pieces of the comm array onto the ground. Avar swiped wildly, the blade glinting in the intermittent light of Hellan Minor⁴. Lera held up the scrap of the comm unit she'd been working on to block the knife which skidded along the metal until it made contact with her finger. As he drew it back, the blade severed two of Lera's fingers causing her to drop the metal scrap to the floor and fall to her knees.

"What the fuck," Lera said. She looked up at Avar who was readying to raise the knife above his head.

"I don't want to die," he said, tears rolling down his cheeks.

"We won't," Lera said, holding her wounded hand into her chest.

"But I'm infected."

"No, you're not," Lera whispered.

"I'm bleeding."

Avar, blade still gripped tight in one hand, looked at the other and found no sign of the blood that had seemed to be all over his body just moments ago.

"No you're not," Lera said, "it's this place."

"Help me--"

Before he could finish his thought, Raea fired a single bullet into his head. His eyes, now clear, widened and then glazed over as a small trickle of blood rolled down his forehead and he fell backwards onto what was left of the comm array as Lera looked on in horror.

---

Author’s Notes

---

So, things aren’t looking great for the crew of the Sol are they? This is the new format for the commentaries moving forward as I’ve got different, exciting content planned for Sundays starting this weekend. Each episode will come with a short author’s note exploring some of the key ideas in that chapter of the story.

This episode, titled ‘Blood’, is very much me ramping up the horror. I knew that when they finally reached the facility, I wanted them all to start experiencing more deeply unsettling and visceral visions. The key, for me, though, was that these visions reflect key aspects of their own personalities or trauma.

By doing this, I thought I could dive a bit deeper into Jaark and Avar - two characters that have existed very much on the periphery thus far. Avar’s vision is different to those that we’ve seen before. Where Nera and Sama have both seen reflections of things from their past, Avar is seeing his greatest fear made manifest.

Avar is afraid of death. Up to this point, he’s always taken the path of least resistance, hiding behind Jaark and Oren to some extent. Now, faced with being alone for the first time, his fears bubble up to the surface once again, finally consuming him.

For Jaark, his vision is born out of guilt in much the same way that Nera seeing the prisoner they transported haunts her. I wanted to hint at the idea that Jaark is always carrying that guilt somewhere within him but that the thing that has control of the facility has, once again, manifested that guilt. I like to think that the conversation he had with Sama about how the Alliance is just the Royals in different clothes dredged up these feelings of guilt that he’d been trying to bury beneath layers of bravado and work.

I hope at least some of these intentions came across in the episode, anyway. I’m keen to know what you thought. I tried a different structure this week, with shorter chapters alternating between Avar and Jaark, what did you think?

In the comments below, tell me what you’d see if you landed on Calibray.

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The Appendix XII

1. The Final War was the uprising led by the Thousand Suns Alliance to overthrow the tyrannical King Setia V and his thousand-year dynasty. The conflict lasted generations and touched every corner of The System in some way.

2. King Setia V was the last reigning monarch of House Setia. He ruled from the Golden Palace of Lunaris and oversaw a period of intense division across The System. A brutal and ruthless warlord, Setia’s reign was marked by continued attempts to assert his power and expand his empire.

3. The Thousand Suns Alliance began within King Setia’s court. Members, some hungry for power, some hoping to build a better path forward, banded together in secret in the universities of Hellan. There they plotted to overthrow the King and so The Final War began.

4. Hellan Minor is the second star of The System. The smaller of the two stars, Hellan Minor sits at the heart of the Minor System which consists of the agricultural centre Doraketh and the gas giant Kundara.