Deep in the mines of Odin III, Father Maria felt a tap on her foot.
Why couldn’t he leave her alone for a minute? “Just a second,” she said. Her upper torso was buried inside an access hatch and covered in wires, two of which she was splicing together with a knife and copious amounts of tape. Someone—probably Maria herself—would have to come in later with proper connectors, but first, they needed to ensure that everything was wired correctly.
She pulled herself out of the hatch and looked up to find Duncan Strasser standing nearby.
“You’ve got power when you need it,” the senior mining engineer said. “Give the word and I’ll flip the switch.”
“Do it,” she said.
Strasser walked out of the tiny chapel, muttering, “I always double check whether it’s all right to give power because of the time I saw a guy get fried by the electrics of a tunneling machine. I was about twenty-five then and, let me tell you…”
Maria had, over the course of the past couple of weeks, learned to tune out Strasser’s endless monologues. No one wanted to work with him, for he rambled on and on, but she was stuck with him per Father Luigi’s orders.
The little chapel, a couple of hundred meters under the surface of Odin III and just off a main shaft, was about thirty feet long and ten feet wide. Maria had insisted that it do double duty: it was a place of quiet and worship, of course, but the heavily reinforced domed roof also served as a cave-in protection area.
Strasser continued talking. “The miners are going to like this more than anyone thought. It’s like this recreation hall on Odin II. It’s not what you’d expect. You—”
“I get it,” she snapped. “You like the lights?”
He smiled. “Do you?”
“Yeah,” she admitted.
“Good,” he said, looking around the chapel. “This place makes me want to stay here, not return to work at all. If the productivity goes down, you’ll probably be hearing from Galactic.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time,” Maria said. “Let’s finish this.”
They went through the entire wiring loom. Lights, dimmers, projector, air conditioning. A couple of bad connections needed to be traced and fixed, and after a while, Strasser talked nonstop. Maria hardly said two words.
He was halfway through a story about his high school girlfriend when she tried to get him back to the task at hand. She strung together the most words all week.
“Audio,” she said. “We still haven’t got the right connections between the amp and the speaker, and I think that’s because I have a wrong connection in back. Things don’t work when they’re not connected. Give me a minute.” She dove back into the access panel and traced the power lines for speakers and the amp. She wrapped the exposed wires and taped the ends together.
An awful sound filled the chapel. While Maria hoped to have soothing classical tones suitable for meditation and spiritual solace, she heard instead a scratching cacophony that seemed to be disembodied voices chanting in an unknowable language.
“Turn it down!” she yelled.
The volume decreased to little more than a murmur as she pulled herself from the wires.
“What was that?” Strasser asked.
Maria gritted her teeth. “Probably just interference through the speaker cables. But look on the bright side. Everything is powered up.”
“I suppose you want to track down the issue now?” Strasser asked.
“Unless you want to take a break?”
Strasser sat on a wooden bench in the front row. “The noise reminds me of the bamboo. Weird.”
Father Luigi had made a point of telling her of Strasser’s accident. Weeks ago, he’d been attacked by a night razor in a stand of bamboo miles from the mines. He and Gruber had been trying to fix the plasma barrier.
“What happened out there?” she asked, the first time she’d tried to get the engineer to talk.
“Nothing. I must have slipped and hit my head. I don’t care what they say. I couldn’t have been out for more than a few minutes.”
“Gruber’s handheld was pretty definite about timing.”
Strasser grunted. “Gruber’s new here. Easily spooked.”
“People say you changed afterwards,” Maria replied.
“Yeah? In what way?”
“They say you talk about different things than you used to.”
Strasser shrugged. “People say a lot of things. Maybe I talk about different stuff. Maybe I don’t. Maybe people just heard me at the wrong time. I say a lot of things.”
Maria worked to keep her face straight. After the past eight hours, she could attest to the veracity of that last statement.
“So you think nothing important happened to you out there?”
“Not a damned thing.” He stood. “I’ll be back in a minute. Need to go to the bathroom.”
He strode out, leaving Maria thinking about how to help him, and whether he even needed help. She was so lost in her contemplation that she almost didn’t notice that the hissing mumbles had been replaced by choral music from her selection.
“Well, that solves one problem,” she said.
“What does?” Strasser asked as he walked back in.
“The interference is gone.”
But as soon as she said it, she realized it wasn’t. The guttural sounds were back… and she had this strange feeling that they were words and not just random unpleasant sounds.
“Damn. It was working a second ago.” They checked the wires. They replaced the cables with units specially hardened against radiation. They ran tests. Nothing helped.
When Strasser’s belly rumbled, he stood up. “I’ll get some food.”
As soon as he disappeared through the door, the angelic music returned.
“Oh, crap,” Maria said, as suspicion came to mind. “He’s not going to like this.”
Strasser returned five minutes later, bearing wraps and drinks and summoning the awful whispers. “I raided the engineer’s cafeteria,” he informed her. “I don’t think they’ll mind considering what you’re doing for the men.” He studied her. “What?”
“Go outside for a second,” she said. She filmed him stepping away. “Okay, now come back.”
“What was that about?”
Wordlessly, Maria handed him the tablet on which the video clearly showed the way the voices stopped and the music started as soon as he stepped out, and how they returned when he did.
Strasser watched in silence. One time. Another. Another. Finally, he set the tablet down.
“Crap,” he said.
“Yeah,” Maria replied.
“What are they saying? The sounds… it’s almost like I can understand them. Like I’ve been hearing them ever since…”
“The bamboo?” Maria said.
“Yeah. The worst part is that they never shut up. They go on and on.”
Maria had to clamp down on her thoughts to avoid saying things about divine justice and karmic boomerangs. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“Dammit. No. I don’t want to talk about it.” He sighed. “But I guess you’re going to make me, aren’t you?”
“Not until you’re ready,” Maria replied.
Strasser took a deep breath, and Maria readied herself to listen. Odin III, it appeared, worked in mysterious ways.
New to Odin III? Find out what you’ve been missing!
Check out The Complete Episode Guide.
Coming Tuesday: Episode 44, “Details,” by Pete Wood
Gustavo Bondoni is
novelist and short story writer with over three hundred stories
published in fifteen countries, in seven languages. He is a member of
Codex and an Active Member of SFWA.His latest novel is a dark historic fantasy entitled The Swords of Rasna (2022). He has also published five science fiction novels, four monster books and a thriller entitled Timeless. His short fiction is collected in Pale Reflection (2020), Off the Beaten Path (2019), Tenth Orbit and Other Faraway Places (2010) and Virtuoso and Other Stories (2011).
In
2019, Gustavo was awarded second place in the Jim Baen Memorial Contest
and in 2018 he received a Judges Commendation (and second place) in The
James White Award. He was also a 2019 finalist in the Writers of the
Future Contest.
His website is at www.gustavobondoni.com
Gustavo has become a regular contributor to Stupefying Stories and we have quite a few stories of his stories on this site. Check them out!
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