Jellyfish Currents
The impact of magnetic tether cables biting into the hull made Riley flinch even through her thickly padded acceleration couch. She didn’t need the warning klaxons to feel her recently liberated fusion drive strain against the force pulling them back towards the space station. So much for a quiet escape.
If she couldn’t figure out a way to outmaneuver the hundreds of fighter drones on her tail, she was headed to a prison asteroid as a long term ice cube. Too bad she’d run out of time to take the official Kenmore headquarters experimental stealth ship flying lessons.
Luck don’t fail me now, she muttered and flicked on a set of red toggles she’d chosen at random. Warning lights of every color burst across the heads up display. Distant stars smeared across the front window of the ship as it spun wildly on it axis. Riley closed her eyes and swallowed back a sudden wave of nausea.
Another round of impacts shuddered down the length of the hull accompanied by the increasingly annoying sound of frantic alarms. “If you don’t help me get out of here there isn’t gonna be much left of you to rescue,” She tried to calm her breathing, re-scanning the control panel for the ‘get me out of here’ magic button. “Help me help you,” A series of blue switches caught her eye, but before she could flip them a computerized voice cut over the alarms.
“May I recommend the hyper-drive? The injection starter is the yellow handle on the left console panel,” the shipboard AI said in clipped English.
“If you knew that all along…” Riley’s hand closed around the handle and slammed it down as hard as she could.
Her seat rotated backwards, the stiff rubber pressurized suit she’d stolen with the ship squeaking in protest every inch of the way. Steel bands extended from either side to hold her tightly in place. The AI was saying something, instructions, or maybe a warning, but Riley couldn’t hear it over the crackling sound coming from the control panel in front of her. Rainbow colors oozed forward, climbing her feet and legs, enclosing her in a gooey melting cocoon that gripped like her mother’s love and tasted like hot chocolate sundaes. And then her head went under and the world ceased to exist.
Riley woke to streaks of salty sweat trickling down her face. A quick glance at the ship’s sensors showed nothing but empty space around her for a hundred kilometers. The grapples were still attached to the exterior of the ship, but luckily hadn’t done major damage. Her shoulders sagged in relief. She’d known she was going to make it, of course. She always did. Somehow knowing that and living through it, however, were two very different things.
Through the front window she saw a asteroid shaped like a mushroom, with a broad cap on a relatively skinnier stem, caught in orbit around a blazing star. She watched breathlessly as a series of volcano eruptions sprouted over the asteroid pockmarked surface, throwing wave after wave of particles into space. Bright colors due to the light refraction from the nearby star’s rays reminded her of the plasma burn-off from Ganymede 6. Instead of sinking down to cover the asteroid’s surface, however, the output soared higher and higher, floating off into space and towards her ship.
At a touch of the controls her seat rotated back up. “Get us to the closet inhabitable planet,” she said through a mouth that felt like burnt sandpaper. “Or at the very least get us away from the sun,” Escaping was only half the battle. Now she had to figure out how to get the ship back in one piece or else this would have all been for nothing.
The shipboard AI made a series of rapid clicks that sounded uncomfortably like a human throat clear. “There are no known planets within transit distance,”
“Bullshit,” Riley snapped back. “You mean now that the shootings stopped you don’t want to help me anymore. We’ll I’m not waiting around to get picked up by some bounty hunter. Give me manual control,” She grabbed the flight yoke and spun the ship around using the maneuvering thrusters. “Just show me where the north star is and — “
Her voice cut off sharply as the shields on the front of the ship flared with blue light. The wave of debris from the volcanic eruption had caught up to them. Translucent jellyfish creatures encircled the ship, floating through the shields like they didn’t exist. Against the stark blackness of space they looked ethereal. She watched, open mouthed, as skinny tendrils from the closest one wormed through the hull of the ship and appeared in front of her. They weren’t physical, that much was clear, or the cabin would have lost air pressure. But they — they were real, weren’t they?
An overwhelming curiosity enveloped her, and Riley found herself reaching a hand out to touch the ghostly figure. Time froze as the creature or cloud or — thing reached out a single tentacle in response. Sudden heat flared through her hand and Riley jerked back in surprise. The glove of her suit had dissolved into light and vanished.
Another jellyfish creature appeared in the cabin, and then more and more, faster than she could count them. Pieces of the control panel disappeared, followed by loud clanks and bangs from somewhere behind her in the ship.
“Cabin life support systems compromised,” the AI said calmly as the familiar warning klaxons sounded overhead.
Already Riley could feel the strain in her chest as her lungs struggled to pull oxygen out of the thinning atmosphere. She reached under her seat for the suits face plate, but came back up holding nothing more than rapidly dissolving tubes of light.
“Get us out of here! Anywhere!” she yelled.
“May I recommend the — “
Riley jerked down the hyper-drive handle and prayed to all the gods she knew of.
The seat tried to recline backwards, but the mechanism broke halfway, pitching her to the floor in a heap. Riley scrambled to avoid the jellyfish tendrils swirling around her, losing another chunk of her suit’s leg in the process. Rainbow colors, swirling in time with the jellyfish movements, turned the inside of the ship into a rotating kaleidoscope of destruction. Sharp heat engulfed her body in invisible flames. This time, in the bubbling cauldron of flame and color, Riley heard her own voice screaming in pain.
Blue and orange flashing lights covered every inch of the ship’s interiors when she finally had the strength to force her eyelids open. She shrank back reflexively, trying to put space between her and them. It wasn’t until after she’d hit her head on the floor that she realized the lights were from the hunter drones surrounding the ship. The shipboard AI had done what she asked by plopping them back a mere fifty feet from where she’d originally left from. From the frying pan, into the fryer, and back to the frying pan.
At least the jellyfish were gone, thankfully. Her first conscious breath told her so was most of the air pressure. It took her forty five excruciatingly long seconds to find the storage locker in the back and slap on a new faceplate.
In the light of the plasma torch cutting open the airlock door, Riley fantasized about throwing the hyper-drive into gear and trying again. The inside of her suit, clammy and sticky with sweat, made her reconsider. There were worse things than being an ice cube for a couple of years.
Jellyfish Currents was originally published in Sixty Minute Stories on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.