Chapter 12
Marco
One moment Marco was desperately pulling a chair out of the wall. The next, the wall was on fire and Marco was getting sucked out into space. He flipped, unable to stop himself while the whole universe spun in a nauseating loop. Marco activated his jetpack just enough to slow down his spinning.
"Ace?" he called.
Static.
"Ace?"
Static.
Marco swallowed and then froze when the wreckage of the F22 interrupted his view. Their ship was little more than a flaming wreck until the last of the oxygen burned up. Warped sheets of metal drifted in the vacuum. He couldn't see any sign of Ace, but he was already far away and still moving fast. Ace could be out there.
"Ace, answer me yoi." Still nothing. Marco's voice cracked for the first time in thirty years. "I need verbal confirmation."
Around him, the rock behemoths kept moving in their slow, inevitable paths. What had hit them? They had been close to an asteroid, yes, but asteroids didn't explode when you got too close—and they'd been hit twice in close succession. The first explosion took out their shields and damaged their hull. The second tore them apart.
And took Ace with it.
Marco closed his eyes. His head was pounding. His suit had taken the brunt of the explosion that the sloop hadn't absorbed, but he was still battered and bruised. Probably concussed, too.
He had three days' worth of water and oxygen if he stretched it. He slowed his breathing, ignoring how his pounding heart demanded he panic. Where was he headed? It looked like…deeper into the Grand Line. The force of the explosion and the suction into space had launched Marco at speed away from the ship. He was too far from any asteroids to even try landing on any of them, never mind that the impact—at the speed he was currently traveling—would break bones.
Think, he told himself, but there was nothing his brain could do here. He just had to wait and see if anything useful crossed his path.
If he didn't asphyxiate first.
Marco woke to the uncomfortable feeling of an empty stomach. He'd been drifting in and out of sleep just to pass the time. His suit offered a couple of simple games to play—a modification Thatch had shown him, actually—which were nice, but he could only play Pong for so long before the blips and beeps drove him mad.
His suit had been attempting to track his distance while he slept. He was deep in the Grand Line, now, deeper than any IPEC expedition had ever gone.
Well, deeper than any that had ever returned, more like.
His suit beeped a warning, his limited sensors detecting an asteroid in his path. He carefully oriented himself to face in the direction he was travelling. It was impossible to completely stop himself from spinning—the adjustments required were too minute for his jetpack—but he could face in roughly the same direction for half an hour or so at a time.
His eyes widened. That was no asteroid. That was a planetoid. A moon. Could it have been knocked out of orbit during the system's formation? It had a crater large enough to justify that. Easily dwarfing all the nearby asteroids, it was directly in Marco's way. He was going to hit it. No, he corrected, setting his jaw. He was going to land on it.
In the end, his moon landing wasn't nearly as exciting as his first helljump. Gravity wasn't as much of a factor as sheer momentum. Marco's knees buckled when he hit the surface, but he didn't need to roll. He'd had enough time to slow down beforehand. It helped that he'd landed in an absolutely massive crater.
He jumped experimentally and went several yards into the air before coming back down. He swallowed. Severely reduced gravity. He'd have to be careful.
Eyeing the crater walls, Marco spun in a slow circle. He wasn't getting anything on radio, not that he'd expected to, and his suit's scanners weren't meant for large-scale sweeps. Crouching, Marco placed a hand on the dusty surface. A pulse shot out of his palm and a scrolling feed opened up on his HUD as the vibrations spread out and then returned. Looked like solid rock for—
Or not. Marco stood and looked right, where the short-range scan had indicated some kind of opening in the surface. The closer he got, the more obvious it seemed. A smaller impact crater within the larger one had pushed rock over the opening, obscuring it from above, but it was clearly visible from this angle once he was looking for it.
He couldn't talk and waste oxygen, but his inner dialogue kicked into full gear.
Okay, Marco, you're on a planetoid or possibly a former moon adrift in the Grand Line with no ship and no backup. You've got two days' worth of oxygen left. You can either sit here and stare at asteroids or investigate the unusual space cave.
He winced. The addition of "space" in front of cave was undoubtedly something he'd picked up from Ace. Still, it was an unusual feature. A planetoid like this didn't have visible water and any that it did have should have frozen eons ago, long before any cave complexes could be formed, much less any as intricate as this one seemed to be.
It was, in a word, suspicious. And the last time he and Ace had entered a suspicious cave, they'd been chased out by a horde of angry, territorial dophages.
Ah, but really, Marco mused, what have I got to lose?
He went into the cave. His HUD flipped to night vision and then flashed a low-light warning as the planetoid rotated enough to put Marco on its dark side so even the meager light that would have come through the cave entrance went away. Without any other option, Marco cracked one of his two emergency glowsticks and held it up. The green light painted the cave walls, which were all disturbingly smooth.
Tracing a hand over the rock, Marco tried to make sense of it. It looked…melted, almost. Definitely liquid at some point. But how would it form caves like this? If they'd been made while the whole planet was still in a magma state, these areas of empty space should have been flooded out of existence.
Something echoed. Marco froze, ears straining to pick up another rush of sound, but none came. When he played back the last couple seconds' audio from his suit's hourly logs, he heard nothing except his own footsteps.
He wasn't going space-mad, was he?
Shaking his head, Marco ventured deeper. Even if he was going mad, he wanted to get to the bottom of this cave mystery before he lost his senses entirely. If anyone else ever discovered this moon, they could unearth the logs from his suit and decide for themselves if he suffered from delusions.
The cave sloped steadily downwards. Marco clipped the glowstick to his belt and watched each step. None of this looked truly natural. The timelines, even just the geology didn't match up with Marco's experience and lessons. Worse, the farther he journeyed, the more frequently he heard those bursts of…something. It wasn't any kind of sound he'd heard before. Lilting, almost, like a bird's call. His suit never picked it up, but Marco knew for sure he was hearing something.
His temperature gauge also went up incrementally, which was odd. This planetoid's core should have burned out millions, if not billions of years ago. Some of the impact craters on it—especially the massive one that had probably knocked it out of orbit—could only have happened when the solar system was forming. It was too unstable, too battered, too small to hold heat for this long.
And yet the numbers kept ticking higher as Marco ventured lower. The…voice?...sounded each time he encountered a fork or junction, directing him through the maze. Marco passed through tens of small chambers where winding caves intersected. Every single one had the same melted walls as the rest. As he walked, he logged each turn. If there was nothing in this planetoid, he at least wanted to die with a view of the stars.
Not that he could stop moving now even if he was on death's door. His curiosity to know what was in these caves had shifted into a need, a pull.
There was something down here, and it was calling him.
He reached the center almost without realizing it. One last junction, one last turn, and suddenly his glowstick couldn't reach the ceiling anymore. The floor bottomed out under Marco's boot and he slipped. The sides were too smooth to grab. Marco tried his best to slow down, but there wasn't much he could do. He didn't get going very fast, and eventually, the slope smoothed out into an almost flat plain.
Shaky, Marco got to his feet and tried to take stock of where he was. A few of the other caves had worked more like slides, but this one was different. For one, he was pretty sure it was more of a cavern, easily hundreds of feet in diameter and possibly spherical.
Doubt flooded through him. Was he in the center of the planetoid? That was impossible. It should be solid.
Then again, the gravity of this place was far less than it should have been…
Marco squinted when sudden light lanced across the cavern. His visor quickly compensated, but he still had to blink spots out of his eyes. Was there someone else here?
The light didn't die, but it diminished to a point that allowed Marco to look straight at the source. The source high, high above his head. The source that was getting closer and singing like Ace in the shower.
Marco stared, transfixed, as the glowing thing dropped from the very center of the spherical chamber to a spot just in front of him. The closer it got, the less it glowed, until it stopped at chest height and hovered. Its odd, blue-gold halo began to fade, and Marco reached out on reflex, catching the fruit before it could fall.
It was heavier than it looked. Marco turned it over in his hands as his suit's sensors threw all kinds of exceptions. It didn't know what Marco was looking at. Marco didn't know what Marco was looking at.
The voice was quiet again, but the magnetism remained. And, unbelievably, it was changing the very atmosphere. Marco watched the oxygen counter tick up with rising incredulity and then realized that the temperature had stopped at a perfectly comfortable seventy degrees.
Hardly able to believe what he was doing, Marco released the seal on his helmet and, cradling the space fruit against his stomach, pulled off the thing that was supposed to be keeping him alive. He took a deep breath. The air was musty, old, but breathable.
His stomach, still empty, rumbled.
"This is insane," Marco whispered, and ate the fruit. He nearly gagged. It tasted awful. Easily the most disgusting thing he'd ever eaten. Still, he couldn't stop himself, and when it was done, the taste disappeared. His knees gave out under him. His whole body tingled, nerve endings lighting up with static. Fingers scrabbled for his helmet and he barely got it on before his vision grayed out and he collapsed.
To his great surprise, Marco woke up. To his even greater surprise, he woke up on fire. That snapped him out of his confusion faster than a face-full of cold water. He bolted to his feet, staggering back and windmilling his arms only for his brain to kick in a second later. He stopped. He dropped. He rolled.
And the flames didn't go out.
Only then, panting, his face a couple inches from the dusty ground, did he realize that his suit wasn't blaring with warnings. Blinking in confusion, Marco peered at the readout. He called up a more detailed diagnostics screen. Ran a full self-diagnostic. Everything came back green.
Marco's gaze drifted back to his right arm, which had gentle blue-gold flames trailing from it. Are you sure?
It didn't hurt, either. Marco pushed himself into a sitting position and stared down at his burning arm. Carefully, he reached over with his other hand and held his palm over the flames. His temperature readout changed, but not much. He waited until the readout held steady, which it eventually did—at 98.6 degrees.
Marco blew out a breath. The flames jumped a little. He then realized that they were spreading, or maybe just cropping up in other places: his legs, his chest, even his head. It took his left ear being changed for Marco to realize that the fire wasn't on him. It was him. He held out both his arms, staring in fascination as they shifted between solid flesh-and-suit and ethereal flames. None of it hurt at all.
The voice came back, only now it was quieter, closer. In his head. Marco blinked.
He was going space-mad. He was going utterly, certifiably insane.
The thing in his head rolled with amusement and then sent waves of calm through Marco's mind. It was…reassuring him? Its mission apparently done, the strange presence curled up in a little-used corner and summarily excused itself from Marco's focus, leaving Marco to deal with the flames on his own.
He stood on wobbly legs that grew steady when his vision didn't gray out again. He took a drink of water to remind himself that he could and then paused. It felt like his stomach was empty again with how the water had splashed into it. But that fruit had easily been larger than his palm.
Or maybe you imagined the fruit, the fire, and you're trying to find logic in a hallucination.
Marco shook his head. He focused on the flames, which were still burning a cool blue and gold. No smoke.
Old legends snaked through his mind, offering possibility where science failed. Marco set his jaw. He wouldn't entertain anything like that until he was somewhere he wouldn't suffocate. The oxygen from earlier was dissipating fast, and while it had topped off his O2H2O pack, he still had only three days to live. He had to get back to the surface.
Suit and memory guiding him, Marco spent the majority of his grueling trip out of the planet's core trying to figure out how to control his fire. It was far easier than he anticipated; when he willed the fire to go out, it went out. Trying to call it back was harder. How could he flex a muscle that didn't exist?
By the time he saw starlight again, he had it roughly under control. The default seemed to be no flames; once the presence in his head fully settled down—producing an odd doubling to Marco's vision before it cleared—the fire disappeared and only reappeared when he called on it.
The planetoid's surface was just as desolate as before. The clock indicated that roughly fourteen hours had passed since he first entered the cave system. Marco scanned the crater and settled on climbing the shortest-looking section of the wall. Before he could take a single step, however, the fire came back, and with it, the thing in his head. They all unfolded at once, leaving Marco no room to get a word in edgewise as the blue and gold swallowed him whole.
He closed his eyes for all the good it would do. When nothing happened, he cracked one open, and then gasped. His whole body was fire—no, not quite. It was fire with a shape. He flexed an arm, only it didn't feel quite like an arm anymore. A wing? Yes, a wing. Two of them. His whole body was different, full of muscles he didn't know forming a shape he could barely believe. And it was all on fire.
A hysterical laugh threatened to break through. Marco swallowed it, barely, but the thought that triggered it remained.
He was a phoenix.
Please review.