Silence.
That’s what woke me, I suppose. There’s always some degree of background noise aboard a starship, if only the hum of electronics, whisper of ventilation fans, or muted conversation from an adjacent compartment.
But I started awake to – well, nothing, apart from the sound of my own breathing. Darkness, the floating space heater providing little by way of illumination, but that was to be expected. A wiring fault had rendered my quarters uninhabitable until Chief Barnes could effect a repair, but sourcing the required parts would have to wait we reached our next port of call, Magdelene Station. Until then I was having to bunk down in one of the half-empty cargo modules, as nobody – including myself – was willing to ‘hot cot’.
I fumbled for my comms. “Bridge, this is Hanson. Has something happened?”
No reply, not even the ‘Wait one’ tone indicating they were busy.
“Bridge, this is Second Officer Hanson, please respond.”
After a few seconds I switched to channel 2. “Engineering, this is Hanson.”
I let the moment draw out before switching to channel 3, ship-wide, if only because of the desperation that represented. “Attention, attention, any station. This is Second Officer Hanson. Acknowledge.”
Nothing, not even the hiss of an open channel.
I’m not easily spooked, no way. I guess living out here, where just about anything that goes wrong will kill you, tends to blunt your sense of anxiety. But hanging there in the darkness, a start of sweat along my hairline, I felt – I knew – that something was badly wrong.
By my chronometer to find I’d only been asleep five hours, but the sleep-cycle shift should have been summoned to station during an emergency, freeing up more alert crewmen to deal with the matter in hand. Nothing made sense.
Then I noticed comms was running on capacitor, that wireless charging was off-line, indicating a main power failure. So it could be nothing more than a reactor scram, which happened at least once per tour, and I let myself relax.
Still, I would be needed on the bridge, and hurried through the graceless ballet of transferring from sleep web to flight suit in zero-G. I undogged the outer hatch and slid the right-hand door aside.
Jesus it was cold; a frost-slap to the face that made me gasp. From what I could see of the corridor only emergency lighting was operational – but the auxiliary generator should be running, if only to maintain a stable working environment during repairs.
Concern returned, now laced with unease.
I stepped onto the ship proper, already starting to shiver. There was something floating up near the mess hall, although the bulkhead lights only served to emphasise the gloom than provide any real illumination at distance. I called out but received no reply – and it could just have been a drift of cables in the rough outline of a man. I looked aft.
sh*t.
The emergency doors were closed, sealing off Engineering. This was bad, this was way bad. It was one thing to be hanging in the space between stars, pending a main engine restart, another to be dead metal floating in vacuum, crippled beyond repair. Radiation leak, coolant rupture, explosive decompression – there were a laundry list of system failures that spelled a death sentence. Although the blast doors had a manual release and hand-crank, without power the environmental monitors would be blank, giving no warning of what I’d find beyond them. There were no answers in that direction.
I headed forward by handholds a short distance, to the dorsal airlock.
Both ready EVA suits were still in the rack, meaning nobody was outside, effecting repairs, and all four inspections drones were still topside as well. I lifted one of the handsets and launched Bot-3, wanting a camera view of the hull, the big picture. What I got was a shoal of cargo modules drifting free of the ship, heading nowhere in a hurry.
I shivered again, but not down to the cold. If I hadn’t left the inner doors open, which automatically engaged the mechanical safety grabs, my module would be out there as well. The fear in my gut was a solid knot, and my hands trembled as I piloted the bot to the maximum elevation its grav field would support, which let me look down the length of the ship, all the way aft.
Jesus wept.
Engineering, the entire stern of the ship, it was gone.
I sent the bot to inspect the ‘damage’, although even calling it that was simple denial – we were f***ed. The Krasnaya Suka was a classic dumb-bell design; engines and engineering aft, bridge and crew quarters forward, joined by a long, narrow spine to which the cargo modules were attached. The spine had been cleanly severed just ahead of the aft bell, as if by a seriously powerful energy beam. The camera lacked a long-range focus but there was maybe a reflective blip a long way astern. sh*t, if both engineering crewmen had survived they were facing an entirely different kind of hell. They’d have heat, light, gravity, water from the recycling tanks – but no food.
Apart from each other.
I tossed the control unit and donned an EVA suit against the now-numbing cold, giving myself a few moments while the environmental systems kicked in. With the second suit tethered in my wake I hand-pulled myself towards the bridge – only to stop when the ‘bunch of cables’ turned out to be crewman Olivera. He hung there, a frozen corpse with no external signs of injury – just dead.
Not someone I knew well: third shift, part of the poker school, grew carnations in the unused hydroponics bay. I brushed frost from his features but they didn’t register pain, or even surprise. Whatever had happened it had been quick, almost instantaneous. I moved him aside and looked into the mess hall itself, activating the cuff light on my suit. Scanning the compartment revealed several corpses amidst a constellation of food containers, but I didn’t go closer to identify them.
I couldn’t.
You make friends quickly aboard a starship or quit at the next port of call. No intimate relationships though, as adding sexual politics to the hothouse environment of an isolated micro-community was asking for trouble. Some people I would miss, others just faces I could put names to, but I knew they were all gone, every last one.
Sole survivor syndrome?
It could wait.
I moved on, only to halt outside the captain’s quarters. When not on duty he set himself apart, being one of those officers who believed that familiarity erodes authority. Some part of me wanted to pay my final respects – well, that’s what the impulse felt like at the time, and any sense of introspection was definitely way down my list of priorities.
After attaching the second suit to a handhold I operated the manual door release and entered the cabin. Captain Mahler was ‘standing’ behind his desk, one shoe snagged in a circular chair spar. With his arms floating at shoulder level, there was an air of Christ, crucified about him, and I crossed myself before saluting.
Without thinking I moved to his shelf of ‘oddities’, and the antique wooden puzzle box that lay there. It was his latest find and held a strange fascination for me that I was unable to rationalise. The captain had passed it around the bridge crew, but nobody had discovered how to part the interwoven strips of palo santo wood. When asked, he merely laughed and said no sane man would open it, which left us none the wiser.
I pulled the box free of the Velcro shelf and turned it over and over in my hands. It spoke to me, not in a literal sense, but as if it were the key to some unquantifiable yearning, a yearning to be whole. Call it looting if you like, but having it about my person was important, end of story. I stowed my memento of Captain Mahler in a thigh pocket, retrieved the second suit, and kept going.
The bridge was a morgue.
That’s what woke me, I suppose. There’s always some degree of background noise aboard a starship, if only the hum of electronics, whisper of ventilation fans, or muted conversation from an adjacent compartment.
But I started awake to – well, nothing, apart from the sound of my own breathing. Darkness, the floating space heater providing little by way of illumination, but that was to be expected. A wiring fault had rendered my quarters uninhabitable until Chief Barnes could effect a repair, but sourcing the required parts would have to wait we reached our next port of call, Magdelene Station. Until then I was having to bunk down in one of the half-empty cargo modules, as nobody – including myself – was willing to ‘hot cot’.
I fumbled for my comms. “Bridge, this is Hanson. Has something happened?”
No reply, not even the ‘Wait one’ tone indicating they were busy.
“Bridge, this is Second Officer Hanson, please respond.”
After a few seconds I switched to channel 2. “Engineering, this is Hanson.”
I let the moment draw out before switching to channel 3, ship-wide, if only because of the desperation that represented. “Attention, attention, any station. This is Second Officer Hanson. Acknowledge.”
Nothing, not even the hiss of an open channel.
I’m not easily spooked, no way. I guess living out here, where just about anything that goes wrong will kill you, tends to blunt your sense of anxiety. But hanging there in the darkness, a start of sweat along my hairline, I felt – I knew – that something was badly wrong.
By my chronometer to find I’d only been asleep five hours, but the sleep-cycle shift should have been summoned to station during an emergency, freeing up more alert crewmen to deal with the matter in hand. Nothing made sense.
Then I noticed comms was running on capacitor, that wireless charging was off-line, indicating a main power failure. So it could be nothing more than a reactor scram, which happened at least once per tour, and I let myself relax.
Still, I would be needed on the bridge, and hurried through the graceless ballet of transferring from sleep web to flight suit in zero-G. I undogged the outer hatch and slid the right-hand door aside.
Jesus it was cold; a frost-slap to the face that made me gasp. From what I could see of the corridor only emergency lighting was operational – but the auxiliary generator should be running, if only to maintain a stable working environment during repairs.
Concern returned, now laced with unease.
I stepped onto the ship proper, already starting to shiver. There was something floating up near the mess hall, although the bulkhead lights only served to emphasise the gloom than provide any real illumination at distance. I called out but received no reply – and it could just have been a drift of cables in the rough outline of a man. I looked aft.
sh*t.
The emergency doors were closed, sealing off Engineering. This was bad, this was way bad. It was one thing to be hanging in the space between stars, pending a main engine restart, another to be dead metal floating in vacuum, crippled beyond repair. Radiation leak, coolant rupture, explosive decompression – there were a laundry list of system failures that spelled a death sentence. Although the blast doors had a manual release and hand-crank, without power the environmental monitors would be blank, giving no warning of what I’d find beyond them. There were no answers in that direction.
I headed forward by handholds a short distance, to the dorsal airlock.
Both ready EVA suits were still in the rack, meaning nobody was outside, effecting repairs, and all four inspections drones were still topside as well. I lifted one of the handsets and launched Bot-3, wanting a camera view of the hull, the big picture. What I got was a shoal of cargo modules drifting free of the ship, heading nowhere in a hurry.
I shivered again, but not down to the cold. If I hadn’t left the inner doors open, which automatically engaged the mechanical safety grabs, my module would be out there as well. The fear in my gut was a solid knot, and my hands trembled as I piloted the bot to the maximum elevation its grav field would support, which let me look down the length of the ship, all the way aft.
Jesus wept.
Engineering, the entire stern of the ship, it was gone.
I sent the bot to inspect the ‘damage’, although even calling it that was simple denial – we were f***ed. The Krasnaya Suka was a classic dumb-bell design; engines and engineering aft, bridge and crew quarters forward, joined by a long, narrow spine to which the cargo modules were attached. The spine had been cleanly severed just ahead of the aft bell, as if by a seriously powerful energy beam. The camera lacked a long-range focus but there was maybe a reflective blip a long way astern. sh*t, if both engineering crewmen had survived they were facing an entirely different kind of hell. They’d have heat, light, gravity, water from the recycling tanks – but no food.
Apart from each other.
I tossed the control unit and donned an EVA suit against the now-numbing cold, giving myself a few moments while the environmental systems kicked in. With the second suit tethered in my wake I hand-pulled myself towards the bridge – only to stop when the ‘bunch of cables’ turned out to be crewman Olivera. He hung there, a frozen corpse with no external signs of injury – just dead.
Not someone I knew well: third shift, part of the poker school, grew carnations in the unused hydroponics bay. I brushed frost from his features but they didn’t register pain, or even surprise. Whatever had happened it had been quick, almost instantaneous. I moved him aside and looked into the mess hall itself, activating the cuff light on my suit. Scanning the compartment revealed several corpses amidst a constellation of food containers, but I didn’t go closer to identify them.
I couldn’t.
You make friends quickly aboard a starship or quit at the next port of call. No intimate relationships though, as adding sexual politics to the hothouse environment of an isolated micro-community was asking for trouble. Some people I would miss, others just faces I could put names to, but I knew they were all gone, every last one.
Sole survivor syndrome?
It could wait.
I moved on, only to halt outside the captain’s quarters. When not on duty he set himself apart, being one of those officers who believed that familiarity erodes authority. Some part of me wanted to pay my final respects – well, that’s what the impulse felt like at the time, and any sense of introspection was definitely way down my list of priorities.
After attaching the second suit to a handhold I operated the manual door release and entered the cabin. Captain Mahler was ‘standing’ behind his desk, one shoe snagged in a circular chair spar. With his arms floating at shoulder level, there was an air of Christ, crucified about him, and I crossed myself before saluting.
Without thinking I moved to his shelf of ‘oddities’, and the antique wooden puzzle box that lay there. It was his latest find and held a strange fascination for me that I was unable to rationalise. The captain had passed it around the bridge crew, but nobody had discovered how to part the interwoven strips of palo santo wood. When asked, he merely laughed and said no sane man would open it, which left us none the wiser.
I pulled the box free of the Velcro shelf and turned it over and over in my hands. It spoke to me, not in a literal sense, but as if it were the key to some unquantifiable yearning, a yearning to be whole. Call it looting if you like, but having it about my person was important, end of story. I stowed my memento of Captain Mahler in a thigh pocket, retrieved the second suit, and kept going.
The bridge was a morgue.
