Nichibotsu

Mal knew that if the projectors failed then the perimeter would be breached as soon as the last sun went down. That didn’t stop him wanting to kick the post that he was trying to fix. He wanted to kick the post until the small steel box that it held in place fell to the ground, where he’d stomp its lenses to smithereens under the steel cleats of his mud-caked boots. There was no sane reason for it, if the perimeter went down it was game over, he knew that. But he could feel his sanity being leached away into the turgid, gripping clay that made every step an effort and clogged the vents in his suit, forcing to take his helmet off in an effort to avoid heat exhaustion. His reason was vaporizing and dispersing with the steam that rose from his sweating head as he laboured helmetless under the three suns. Insanity edged closer every time he let go of the post and watched his most recent effort to right it fail, as it slowly listed in the liquid ground. Each time this happened the projector’s siren began to berate him as its lens slipped out of alignment with its neighbour in the perimeter chain and the ion field blinked out of existence.

Mal was a mechanic, not an engineer, but he knew enough to have concluded that his task was hopeless. He needed a longer post, or something to build a more stable structure altogether. He needed something to firm up the ground, maybe some ferrete to pour a foundation. He didn’t have any of these things. What he did have was one of Tall Sergeant’s stinking boots that he was employing as a hammer, and some salvaged wiring and aerials that he had been using to try and fashion some sort of guide rope system. Nothing was working – the mud swallowed everything, sometimes with dismissive speed, sometimes in agonizing slow motion, imperceptibly shifting under his firmly hammered post until it slipped, slowly as a minute hand, out of alignment, triggering the whining siren.

Mal looked up at the three suns. The smallest was already close to the horizon formed by the mass of vine-strewn black rock that sat over the cave systems they had been tasked with exploring. He estimated that the first sun and its thin violet light would be gone within the hour. The second, closer sun would follow it soon after, taking its searing heat and fierce red light with it, leaving only the ice blue sun to sink through the remainder of Mal’s time to fix the perimeter, the remainder of the time he had left to do anything.

He’d worked his way out of a Martian substreet, where drinking water condensed from shuttle exhaust was a luxury, into a productivity program where he had been identified (without the aid of any enhancements!) as a potential mechanic. After years of integration, proving that he could supplement a shuttle’s AI and the output of enhanced colleagues, he had been promoted to Tactile Mechanic Third Class and assigned to the crew of the Mogul. He had survived the journey to a partially mapped planet in a partially mapped galaxy with a pioneer expedition, and now, after all of that, he would die at sunset if he couldn’t mend a fencepost.

The tech was fine, the guts of the projectors were Calm Lieutenant’s department, at least they were now, now that Arrogant Captain was dead. The responsibility may have passed to Tall Sergeant, but he was dead too. Even at third choice, Calm Lieutenant’s cognitive enhancements had been up to the task of maintaining the ion projectors. Calm Lieutenant had been sitting at the workstation in the shuttle, bent over one of the projectors with a nano driver, when he had ordered Mal out to repair the perimeter.

“Obake,” Calm Lieutenant had said, pointing out from his workstation in the direction of the perimeter.

“Go back?” Mal had replied, still caked in a goulash of mud and viscera after dragging the remains of Tall Sergeant from the perimeter back to the improvised morgue in the relative cool to be found under the shuttle. He had slumped into a seat in the darkness of the shuttle’s hold, the only light coming from the flash and spark of Calm Lieutenant’s fizzing nano driver as he continued working on his project. “Go back,” Mal had repeated to himself.

“Obake,” Calm Lieutenant had repeated, picking up the projector he was working on by a handle that he had attached to it and adjusting an array of newly fitted lenses.

Mal had taken a deep breath. The air was thick with the scent of the warming corpses stowed under the shuttle and the funk of his own exhausted body leaking from the neck of his work suit. He’d closed his eyes and let his head fall back against the shuttle’s hull.

“Obake,” Calm Lieutenant had repeated again, pointing down at the floor and once more out towards the perimeter.

“What?”

“Obake.”

“I don’t understand you,” Mal had said, too tired to be angry at his earnest superior.

Calm Lieutenant put down the projector and sketched out a diagram on the workstation. The ring of perimeter projectors and their support posts. He added a stickman in the middle.

“Man.” Calm Lieutenant pointed at the stick man and then Mal. He drew another stickman and pointed at it and then himself, “Jibun.”

Calm Lieutenant drew a line perpendicular to one of the posts and an arrow indicating it falling into a horizontal position. “Shitu,” he said pointing at the floor.

“Shitu means Down?” said Mal, pointing at the floor.

Calm Lieutenant scribbled out the perimeter line and then crossed out both of the stickmen.

“If the perimeter goes down, we’re dead,” said Mal pointing at Calm Lieutenant and then himself and drawing a gloved finger across his grimy throat.

Calm Lieutenant had nodded solemnly, but then raised both index fingers and quickly sketched out a new perimeter. Lines burst from the Mal stickman to each of the surrounding posts and the perimeter line was strengthened with an emphatic double line. Long straight lines were then scratched out, emanating from the Calm Lieutenant stickman and bursting outward, crossing the perimeter in all directions. Calm Lieutenant drew with increasing speed, the lines becoming wild and ending in scribbled chaos at the edges of his page. He’d looked up at Mal, eyes bright with the suggestion of a smile.

“I need to go back out there and keep the perimeter up,” said Mal, as he’d risen to his feet and shuffled down the shuttle’s ramp, back out into the red swamp.

Arriving alone at the perimeter, hundreds of meters from the shuttle, Mal had quickly realised that the tech was fine, but the posts that held the projectors were not. He had spent hours with Calm Lieutenant and Tall Sergeant getting the perimeter set up as soon as they had realised the danger that they were in, although only Calm Lieutenant seemed to fully grasp the value of an ion field. Fixing the projectors to their posts and aligning them all had been a tough job with all three of them working together for a whole day. Not least because the problems had started before Mal had even been woken from his transit sleep and all power had been diverted to survival systems and Calm Lieutenant’s tools, leaving the Atillian crew and their unenhanced, foreign, TacMec without their translators. Tall Sergeant and Calm Lieutenant had talked in their smooth, bubbling dialect and then directed Mal through a combination of gesture and pantomimed modelling. They had tried to introduce themselves but the noises that accompanied the patting of their chests were unpronounceable to Mal. In response, after much exasperated repetition, Mal had managed to get Calm Lieutenant to call him Man. Tall Sergeant decided to manage without using any version of Mal’s name and just occasionally saying his only word of English - Good! - in a clear, confident voice, albeit with the G hissing softly in in the back of his throat, driving the owlish vowels into the hard bulkhead of the D. Somehow, with Mal as the baffled audience to an Attillian dialogue punctuated with exclamations of Man! and Good! they had managed to get the ion field functioning before the blue sun set.

But maintaining the perimeter now, on his own, was a Sisyphean task, if Sisyphus had been a half-crazy mechanic with a bloody boot for a hammer, wading from one subsiding post to another in a waist-high mire. He dropped to his knees and let his shoulder fall against the heavy post.

“Mal,” said a clear, confident voice from the darkness of a cave hewn from the black rock beyond the perimeter. As Mal looked up the smallest sun touched the horizon splaying a shadow in front of the cave. Tall Sergeant stepped out of the cave and into the shadow, crouching as he neared its edge to stay in its darkness.

“You’re dead,” said Mal, slowly shaking his head. “This is your boot, I think there’s a bit of your foot still inside it.”

“I’ve come to help you, Mal,” said Tall Sergeant, smiling at Mal.

“No, you haven’t. You’re dead, you’re not you. I saw the captain eat you.”

“Don’t be silly, Mal. I’m alive, the captain didn’t eat me. You’ve been working too hard.”

“Yes, he did. When you picked up your pack. We’d finished setting up the perimeter just as the blue sun went down. The projectors worked, the ion field held the captain back, until you picked up your pack and accidentally interrupted the beam. We tried to pull you back but he got away with most of you. We had to let go so that the beam didn’t stay broken. There was nothing else we could do. I’m sorry.” Mal felt the sting of sweaty tears on his burning cheeks.

“No, Mal. No need to be sorry, I’m fine. I did go to the cave with the captain, but he didn’t eat me. The captain’s on our side, isn’t that right, Sir?”

“Of course it is,” said the captain, striding out of the cave towards the sergeant and placing a hand on his shoulder to move him back from the shadow’s edge.

The smallest sun disappeared behind the caves, causing the shadow to suddenly shrink away from the perimeter as its solar light source disappeared. The red light of the middle sun flared as it settled lower towards the horizon and a new, darker shadow began to grow, the captain and the sergeant advancing forward at its edge like the creeping crest of a black wave.

“Hello, captain,” said Mal. “I’m guessing things didn’t go too well in the caves?”

“They went better than I could have ever dreamed, Mal. I told you all I was doing the right thing, pressing on. Everything we need is down there; food, fresh water. We’ll take you there, Mal, you can see for yourself. Come with us now.”

“Think I might just stay here, captain, if it’s all the same to you.”

“This is your captain speaking, Tactile Mechanic Third Class. You will do as you’re ordered.”

“Well, that’s all very well, sir, but my captain was a vegetarian who couldn’t speak English, so, I think I might just stay here behind the ion field.”

The captain grinned, folded his hands behind him and leaned back to check the progress of the red sun.

“The shadow will fall away again when the red sun sets, but then only the blue sun will remain and there’ll be no need to retreat, no need for us to hang back,” said the sergeant.

“The blue light is our favourite,” said the captain.

Mal felt the post shudder as a delirious laughter overtook him. The ion field flickered as the projector shook. Holding his breath to stifle his growing hysteria, he eased himself away from the post and sat back in the mud. After a second of stillness the post began to tip towards him, losing its grip on the shifting, liquid earth. Mal sprang forward and grabbed the post, pushing it back upright before the siren could sound. In his rush to avoid the siren’s awful shriek he threw himself at the post with too much force and skidded forward, pushing the post past the vertical and down, flat into the mud. He landed on top of it, the reinforced shoulder of his heavy work suit breaking the bracket that held the projector in place. He looked up to see the captain and the sergeant looking sympathetically down on him from a few meters away. The red sun dipped behind the caves and the world turned blue. The captain and the sergeant crouched and skulked forward to the very edge of the shadow, pale faces grinning in the ice blue light, almost arms reach from Mal.

Mal clambered to his feet and pulled at the end of the post, attempting to stand it up. The mud made skates of his boots and sucked the post away from him. His muscles burned as their starved fibers stretched and snapped against the mud’s gravity. He gave up on the post and grabbed the projector, scooping it up and scraping mud from its lens. He stood and aimed its beam at the next projector in the sequence, carefully manipulating it to try catch the beam of the preceding projector and complete the chain.

“Oh, Maal,” said the sergeant, “now you’re being ridiculousss.”

Mal ignored him and fished around in the cooling air for the sweet spot where the post had held the projector. Breathing deeply to still his shaking hands, he twisted the projector slightly and the field sprang back to life. Mal gritted his teeth, terrified to move or even react in case he broke the beam.

“When the blue sssun sssets, Mal, we’ll have about sssix hours of darknesss to play in. Can you ssstay like that for sssix hoursss, Mal?”

“Oh!” said the sergeant falling forward onto his hands and slithering towards the advancing edge of the shadow. “It’sss nearly ti-iiime!”

Mal watched the blue sun dip behind the caves, its light lingering on the wet, silvered skin of the sergeant and the captain as they rose in the darkness to face him on the other side of the ion field. A shudder rolled up his spine and he dropped the projector. The absence of light was complete. He stared into nothingness and relaxed.

“SHITA!” yelled Calm Lieutenant.

Mal’s lizard brain heard the word Down! and with his last conscious act he threw himself back, deep into the black mud.

The beam from Calm Lieutenant’s weaponized projector split the night like red lightening, showering Mal in sparks and the shredded remains of the captain and the sergeant.

“Kuso Yurei,” said the Lieutenant.

“Obake,” said Mal, “obake shita.”