Ceteroquin: The Captain Finally Loses His Head

This is the fourteenth part of The Trapping of the Ceteroquin. This story appears in full in M/U's 2020 speculative fiction anthology, Demiurges and Demigods in Space, Vol. 1 and will be run as a serial online every Tuesday and Thursday for the next couple of months and each entry can easily be found here. To read this in its entirety, along with all of the other brilliant pieces included in the collection, you can obtain paperback and PDF copies in our store, with Kindle versions available on Amazon.

Though he did not admit it to anyone –not until much, much later – Captain Hancock himself lost his mind shortly before they would be forcibly removed from the confines of the discernible cosmos. 

Unlike the others, who (understandably) attributed the sudden and pervasive spirit of doubt and dread that fell upon them to either their own actions on the Striper or their broader decisions in life, the Captain knew this foreign, invasive force for what it was – some kind of psychic attack. Now he could see the trap, and could see how they had so totally and enthusiastically had fallen for it.

This was when the training and experience and discipline really came into play – that was how he could see it. Even so, he had failed to see it so clearly in time. The psychic attack. While he and Laura and Ben had been so focused on accomplishing “the mission”, he’d left his crew, the ship, the mission, and the Group inexcusably exposed to something worse than mere mission failure. 

The failure of imagination was itself inexcusable, terminally so. If this did not turn out to be the end of his career as a captain, he felt maybe he deserved for it to be. 

But it was no longer certain, at all, whether they’d make it out to the other side of this thing.

That’s when he really felt his marbles scramble, and he lost control of his mind for a while. Never entirely, of course – he was much too strong for that. But it was some hours spent with only minority control of his own psyche as he wrestled to get it all back. It was a good thing he’d been alone; to have any of the others witnessing him in his moment of deepest weakness and borderline-defeat might squeeze his ability to captain a ship from within him. 

Then again, he wondered absently, his thoughts disembodied, as though floating in the room, what if it would be comforting if Laura were here? Or perhaps our dear priest or Ben or the Doctor – maybe any of them? 

Was it really so impermissible for him, as the Captain, to ever totally rely on any (or all!) of the others for aid?

Why would it be?

And yet, even were he to grant himself such permissions, this was a purely disembodied and hypothetical question. Everyone else was now asleep, afflicted by the same malevolent invader but almost certainly unable to realize it – much less ward it off. He would have to face this alone. This, he knew, was how it always had to be.

Or fail. He could always fail. Failure was a thing that happened, a thing that people did, even highly-regarded and accomplished people. Failure had always been a possibility, something of a quiet and constant companion. Maybe that was how things would turn out. He would fight, of course, but people lose fights, even mortal ones, every day, every hour, all the time. 

How was he any different? How could he possibly be exempt? 

Things, after all, are bound to happen. All manner of things.

Somewhere around this point– he could only remember it in terms of thought sequence and not of time – he had a sudden flash from another direction, a more urgent thing, and he couldn’t remember the words for it (or maybe he simply didn’t know them) but he knew he had to get to the control room. Now. 

It wasn’t far, which was fortunate with his mind still in a state of fragmentation and his motions lacking full coordination. His concentration was failing, multiple times per minute, to hold steady the simple – hell, mundane – task of walking to his own control room on his own ship. It wasn’t like they had crashed. Without looking at any instruments or even out his own window, he knew the ship was moving normally. 

As soon as he reached the center of the control room, the ship stopped moving normally. He hadn’t touched anything. All of the screens in the control room came to light at once; he struggled for a few seconds to take some of it in, impeded as he was both by his own impaired state of being and also by the fact that the information being screamed at him by his ship’s computer was contradictory in some cases and entirely nonsensical in others. 

He slapped the button to make transparent the control room’s own viewing wall, and as the transition transpired he was brought to his knees – if only for a moment – in terror at the fact that he saw nothing but featureless, almost flat white illumination.

His first thought was that the computer had malfunctioned and hyperspaced them straight into a star, but that didn’t make very much sense. He would be dead and there would be no window to look at and if this were the white light of a star and he were somehow still alive he would at least have been blinded by it. But it wasn’t blinding, just flat and white. This was something else, something weirder. 

He pulled himself to his feet and managed to get over to some of the wall controls to double-check his conclusion that they were not presently in the center of a star. 

Maybe this is what happens when you hyperspace into the middle of a star, he wondered. Maybe you don’t die right away. Maybe you die but you keep thinking like you’re alive. Maybe that’s how it is. Will this machine actually even tell me if I am dead?

He tried to shush the questions, desperate to gather something from what the robot intelligence was trying with great difficulty to say.

Eventually, he came to understand, based on all available evidence, that they were now nowhere. They were in a place that did not exist in the measurable cosmos. 

Interesting, he thought coolly, finally starting to win the battle for his own mind. Interesting – and out of his area of expertise.