[Original Novel] Metal Fever 2: The Erasure of Asherah, Part 21

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Boss man looked at me, then at his men, plainly frightened. The craft began to tilt, and a loud buzzer sounded. The dispaly panel cut to static, then folded back up into the ceiling as one alarm after the next joined the increasingly deafening din.

The craft continued to tilt, then struggled to right itself briefly until one of the engines gave out. It then entered into a stomach churning spin as the six of us held fast to our armrests with white knuckles. I thought I heard boss man quietly reciting Dianetic calming tech to himself.

The lights flickered, and the alarms began to warble as power cut in and out. Panic consumed me. I did the only thing which came to mind, and curled into a ball. I dimly remembered from some trivia game that this is the most survivable posture in a crash.

The last thing I remember before blacking out on impact was hearing the muffled bang of the emergency chute explosively deploying behind us. For what little good it did. When I awoke, it was within a mangled wreck in the process of going up in flames.

I fought with my seatbelt, at last unbuckling myself and climbing out of my seat. The entire front of the craft had crumpled inward, crushing the four fullmetals. Boss man was impaled on a hydraulic piston that had penetrated up through the cabin, originally part of the landing gear.

I pried open the little acrylic case mounted to the near wall with the fire extinguisher and removed it, hastily trying to make sense of the instructions. I’ve never actually used one of these before. After sussing it out, I blasted dense white foam at the conflagration.

Within a few minutes I’d put out all the fires inside the cabin. Cloudy white particular swirled about in the air, residue from my generous application of fire retardant foam. I first checked the pulse of the only other person in the room I’d expect to have one, and confirmed he was as dead as he looked.

A dangling cable sparked perilously close to my face. I ducked under it and pulled the emergency release lever on the hatch. Explosive bolts launched the hatch a short ways, landing in a cluster of ferns. Sunlight invaded into the cloudy, flickering interior, as did the unmistakable musky scent of jungle.

Most of the North American continent is like this now as a result of desert reclamation projects, and unexpectedly robust GMO variants of tropical fauna. Like the foolhardy import of kudzu all over again, if anything it was too perfectly suited to the new climate and rapidly spread out of control.

It meant I couldn’t be sure exactly where we’ve crashed. I didn’t keep track of the flight duration and basically anywhere far enough north or south of the equator is like this until you get to Canada or Russia. I might be able to work that out from the flight recorder, but the more immediate priority was to extinguish the exterior fires.

That turned out to be a bigger job than expected. The battery was in the process of melting down, noxious electrolyte bubbling out of a fracture in the craft’s battery casing. “Well fuck” I muttered to myself. “This thing isn’t going anywhere.”

There’s no halting a reaction that energetic. The battery chemistry is designed for crash safety, but it still radiated a good deal of heat and a foul odor as it burnt itself out. When it finally finished, I was able to extinguish the last few fires visible from the outside of the craft.

I was now sweating like a pig. From fear I thought, until I allowed myself to rest. Only then did I appreciate how disgustingly sweltering it was. The humidity was so high I felt as if the air was a liquid as I moved through it, searching the wreckage for the flight recorder.

I couldn’t find the tools I knew I would need to extract it. What I did find was boss man’s pistol, tucked away in a concealed carry holster. Every immediate threat to my person was pacified so far as I could tell, but I expected I’d find a use for it soon enough.

I stumbled into the shade of the nearest tree and flopped down on the soft green undergrowth. Is any of this poisonous? I couldn’t make myself care. Emotional exhaustion, more than anything else, demanded I slow my roll.

I laid there for another few minutes waiting for my heart rate and breathing to slow before climbing back to my feet and more closely surveying the crash site. We’d come down in a clearing about three hundred feet across, to one side of a stream.

Sampling the steam revealed it was fresh water. My first stroke of good luck in an otherwise profoundly unlucky day. I then searched my body for injuries. I was bruised but no bones seemed to be broken. My prosthetic leg was another story.

The upper segment of the pneumatic piston which actuates my ankle was busted, bent irreparably out of shape and ripped free of its hinge. As such it was a chore to walk, as I could no longer push off with that foot. It felt like dragging a bunch of dead weight.

I knew I wouldn’t get far unless I could fix it, but none of the mangled fullmetals had any pneumatic components. It was too archaic, having been superceded before I was even born by now ubiquitous gel muscles.

However, the hatch was pneumatically opened and closed before I blew the emergency bolts. The two thin aluminum pistons still dangled uselessly from the rim of the opening. The bottom portion was too long, but the upper portion looked very close to the right size.

They turned out to be easily serviceable without tools, each piston possible to open for cleaning by twisting a small red release knob. With the plunger portion removed, I was able to replace it with the one from my leg. The upper portion of the piston, which on my leg had been twisted out of shape, was replaced entirely with the one from the craft.

They fit together, but not perfectly. It now loudly hissed every time I pushed off with my toe while walking, due to air escaping through the imperfect seal. But it worked well enough that walking was no longer an awkward chore.

I felt like roasted shit and probably looked even worse. But I figured there would be time to worry about that after I found Dad and warned him that the goons on his tail are getting close. They won’t give up so easily. Once they find out about the crash, they’ll send a second crew.

The only thing resembling food that I could find onboard were the complimentary snacks. There was a tap for dispensing drinking water concentrated from the outside air, but it had been demolished in the crash. If not for the stream I’d be considerably more fucked.

I drank deeply of the water, taking care to get it from upstream of the crash, worrying that toxic chemicals from the ruptured battery might be leaking into the stream through the soil. I then closed my eyes and tried to set my current location as “home” in my GPS app.

It didn’t work. Why? Something related to the space elevator? I still couldn’t bring myself to fully believe what I’d witnessed on that talkshow. Could it have been satire? Just a weird coincidence that it occurred at the same time as the shockwave?

If it really happened, I can only imagine the political turmoil taking place back in the civilized world right now. The finger pointing, the saber rattling. Probably there would be at least one war as a result of the attack.

None of that’s relevant to my immediate survival however. The wrecked VTOL would make for an acceptable shelter until tomorrow, I decided. Fresh water’s taken care of. My leg is mostly fixed. That only left food, of which I had scarcely any.

My stomach growled. Already? I tore open one of the packets of salted peanuts, munching thoughtfully on them as I mentally modeled my situation. GPS isn’t working for some reason, possibly disrupted by the collapse of the space elevator somehow.

That made it impossible to get my bearings without the data on the flight recorder. I would need to fashion some sort of tool to pry the telematics compartment open, if I could even get to it. I’d have to remove the mashed up remains of those four fullmetals first.

I put that off until tomorrow, though I did pull boss man’s body free of the wreckage and deposited it a good hundred or so feet into the jungle. If I’ve gotta sleep in that thing, I at least don’t want it to smell like a rotting corpse.

Then again, sweat now trickling down every inch of exposed skin, I hardly smell any better. I washed myself in the stream, scrubbing off not just the accumulated sweat but the thin layer of extinguisher residue.

To my own surprise, I began laughing. Out of relief that I survived, I guess. But also because only now did I feel like I had the time and space to fully process what happened. I can’t believe curling up into a ball actually worked! I’ll have to remember that one.

From this side, I could see the entire upper half of the wrecked VTOL was coated in photovoltaic film. When I pried open the maintenance panel with a flat bit of metal debris, it turned out to be easier than anticipated to re-route the solar film output from the battery into the amenities circuit instead.

Just like that, the lights came back on. The video panel folded back down, though it still displayed only static. Much to my delight, there was also a small toolkit attached to the inside lid of the maintenance compartment. Only a wrench and screwdriver, but it was enough to get at the flight recorder after a few minutes of grunting and heaving.

There was understandably no wireless access. I pulled out the retracting USB nano plug from my forearm and plugged it in. This is where I ran into a brick wall. The flight data was hardcore encrypted. It wouldn’t be much use to me unless one of the programs in my good ol’ bag of tricks could decrypt it.

I downloaded the contents to my own system and set a brute force decrypter to work. Under estimated time remaining, there were three questions marks. Not a good sign. By now the sun was low on the horizon.

There were more insects buzzing about now. Do they come out at sunset to breed or something? More than a few were alarmingly large. More products of bungled genetic engineering programs intended to restore species driven to extinction by the warming climate.

Like something straight out of the Permian era. Appropriate, given the state of the ocean these days. No sooner did I have the thought than I caught a whiff of rotten eggs. It can’t be. On top of everything else that’s gone wrong today?

But it was. A gas front, blown in from the sea. I must be pretty near to the coast. I tapped at the control screen, scrolling through options until I could confirm that the amenities battery had absorbed enough energy from the solar film to run the air scrubber for a few hours.

I then tried over and over to put the hatch back in place, to no avail. Exactly as they were designed to, the explosive bolts had torn it right out of its hinges, such that it now would no longer remain in place.

Rapidly running out of options and coughing up a lung, I tore up the carpet from the aircraft interior and fashioned a door flap from it. Didn’t offer much in the way of insulation, but it was a passable barrier to gas exchange.

So it was that I rode out the gas storm in my makeshift shelter. Never again to be an aircraft, beginning instead its new life as my only protection from the elements. As the night wore on, it never grew properly cold, just less uncomfortably warm.

When I climbed outside to take a leak, I found my hand was no longer responding. When I closed my eyes, I noticed a flashing low battery indicator for both my arm and leg. The leg still had one bar left, enough that I could finish answering the call of nature and return to the shelter.

I’d already used up the small amenities battery running the air scrubber for several hours. I had no choice but to stay put the rest of the night, waiting for the sun to return and supply desperately needed power.

I did not wind up getting any sleep. Being stranded in the wilderness has that effect. But as hoped, once the sun was up the lights came back on, and the induction coils embedded in the seat started recharging my prosthetics.

My stomach resumed gurgling in protestation of the fact that I’d eaten nothing but a handful of peanuts since the crash. A second bag of peanuts placated it for the time being. While I ate, I ruminated on the power supply problem.

With the main battery destroyed, the comparatively tiny amenities battery was the only means to store power generated by the solar film. A godsend to be sure, but there was a sense in which the small capacity of it created more problems than it solved.

Sure, I had effectively unlimited power from the solar panels during the day. But at night I had enough power to run the scrubber, or charge my prosthetics…not both. There was no readout to confirm it, but I suspected the amenities battery to be one, maybe two kilowatt hours at most.

When it occurred to me that the fullmetals probably contained embedded air scrubbers, I felt a pang of guilt at the idea of cannibalizing their remains. Then again, had it not been for the crash, they probably would’ve shot both Dad and myself into a ditch by now.

The small tools from the inside of the maintenance compartment were sufficient to remove the chest panel on the least mangled fullmetal remains. I didn’t recognize almost any of the components inside. Truly next level shit.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 22!}