by Matt Thomas
CHAPTER SEVEN
The alarm didn't wake him up, exactly. It opened his eyes; it reconnected him to the world outside his head, but his detached hibernation hardly qualified as sleep. For the past four days he barely left his station, which significantly degraded his mental state. He shifted between anger and depression, but did so mostly alone, avoiding the Hitchhiker when possible, and leaving the cockpit only when he knew his passenger had secured himself in the berth for the night.
The sudden break in routine though got his adrenaline pumping. Since it wasn't an emergency alarm, it meant no air was escaping and the ship still functioned normally. The flashing light bounced off the windshield, drawing Lind's attention to one screen rarely used so far outside a planetary system. They had crossed the invisible line marking the outermost orbits of the irregular moons hours before. Pure emptiness lay for hundreds of millions of miles between Saturn and Jupiter. The novelty of stumbling across any other ship in transit always piqued Lind's curiosity.
One look at the sensor suite nudged the investigator from mild interest into a careful examination. Nearly a hundred thousand kilometers away, a Guppy drifted. It didn't drift in the way a ship coasted after the initial engine push. It careened through space at an odd angle, leaving a slight but detectable trail of debris behind. The ship emitted no signals and no running lights blinked. Visually, it nearly disappeared. The size of the ship set of the alarms. The enormous, long-haul super-freighter stood out against the backdrop of nothingness on the sensors, triggering a proximity alarm.
Lind fixated on the other ship, so much so that he missed the Hitchhiker appearing behind him.
"I heard the alarm. What's going on?"
"I'm not sure. . ." He didn't expand on his answer, not that he had much to say, anyway. He squinted to make out the shape of the other ship. Its total lack of power obscured it amongst the stars. Lind maneuvered his own ship, slipping left and right, using the back-lit stars to trace an outline. Then Lind set his approach.
It didn't take long for him to discern the profile of a Guppy. The swollen belly dwarfed the long, slender spine containing control rooms, quarters, and engines. Large enough to carry a small cruise ship in its cargo hold, Ephemeris Engineering designed the Guppy to carry huge amounts of cargo long distances with only a skeletal crew. The Sadko-operated behemoths commonly appeared along major trade hubs, just as their crews commonly disrupted the peace once they spilled out from their ships into a station's bars and brothels. But Lind could count on one hand the number of times he had stumbled across one in transit.
Once they were close enough, the Mako's spotlight played along the other hull, catching reflections from the scrapes and dents in the light red paint. Lind matched the angle of attack and speed until relativity made both ships look like they were standing still while traveling thousands of kilometers a second.
"Is it derelict?" The Hitchhiker asked.
"Looks that way."
"I wonder how long it's been here."
"No telling. Could be a few days. Could be a year or more. Probably more recent, though, or it would be even less likely it would be on a course like this."
The spotlight found the cockpit. Nothing moved inside. The shadows revealed nothing. Beneath one of the long glass panels, Lind could read the ship's name etched underneath in Cyrillic. Natalia.
"I've seen that name before." Lind announced. Without being abrupt, he flipped through his case notes. The Hitchhiker looked over his shoulder. "Yeah, this was the Guppy that stopped at Iapetus."
Behind him, the Hitchhiker staggered backwards. Lind looked back at the man, almost spiteful at what appeared to be an overreaction.
"Are you sure?"
"Pretty sure."
The man stared blankly into space. "I can't believe it. I just saw that ship a couple of days ago. I tried to hitch a ride. What happened to the crew?"
The Mako panned along the port side of the ship. A void, marked by yellow and black caution stripes, broke the smooth lines of the hull where an escape pod had jettisoned. Crossing over the topside of the ship, they checked its twin. The crew had ejected the starboard pod, too.
"Whatever happened, they got out." Lind observed.
"Where's the lifeboats?"
He ran the numbers in his head. "The ship left Iapetus almost a week ago, headed straight to Io. There's no way to tell how long it's been like this. The escape pods could have drifted anywhere." Lind continued to scan the external portion of the hull, looking for some sign of something that had caused the loss of the ship. They followed the curve of the ship's belly, towards the massive pair of double doors fronting the cargo hold.
"There, look." The Hitchhiker pointed over Lind's shoulder to a spot on the hull illuminated by the spotlight. Next to one hinge, a panel hung open, a few cables drifting out into space. Only a square foot, the electrical components controlled access to the bay. Someone had broken into the hold from the outside.
"You're a mechanic, right?" Lind asked.
"Ye... yeah." The Hitchhiker stuttered.
"Great. We're going to suit up and go aboard."
"Wait, what?" He physically stepped back into the doorway of the cockpit as though trying to distance himself from the investigator.
"We're going inside. Lind repeated. "I need you to figure out what's going on with her systems. Something pretty catastrophic must have happened because she should still be running. She's been out here more than a week, but that power supply should last for months."
"Can't you do that?" The Hitchhiker asked.
"Nope. I've got other things to do." He didn't feel like explaining himself further.
"I can say no, you know. I'm not under any obligation to help you."
Lind kept his eyes on his own instrument panel as he aligned the Mako with the airlock behind the Guppy's bridge. "You wanted a ride. In fact, you insisted on a ride. Part of Article Thirty-Two says that you are required to provide assistance to investigators. So, you can either find out why this ship is already dead in the water, or you can spend an extra few weeks at the detention facility on Ceres Station while we sort through whether you had any involvement in this."
"What are you talking about?" The Hitchhiker nearly shouted in self-defense. "How would I have anything to do with . . . with whatever the fuck happened here?"
Lind finally turned to his guest and shrugged. "This ship came from your location and you refused to render aid. I think I can come up with a reasonable argument you should be under suspicion. It's a long way to Io, and an even longer way to the asteroid belt. I'll have time to work on it while you're sitting in the cell downstairs."
The Hitchhiker remained silent. The Mako shuddered as it contacted the larger ship and their docking bays kissed.
Lind hopped up from his seat and shoved his way past the Hitchhiker. "You coming?"
By the time Lind changed into his protective suit, the other appeared in the doorway to the forensic lab. Lind pointed to the second suit hanging in the locker, Kay's, and the Hitchhiker reluctantly pulled it on.
The airlock dumped them into the corridor shooting aft from the cockpit. Gravity somehow remained in effect although that was not unusual. The artificial gravity plates needed minimal power and ran on their own closed system. Ephemeris designers decided a crew would have enough to fight in an emergency without worrying about a sudden loss of weight. The rest of the systems, however, appeared completely gone. Pitch black concealed everything. A few glowing emergency chemical lights still leaked pale yellow light in places. Both men waived the beams from their torches around the interior. Almost immediately, Lind knew why the crew abandoned ship.
"Decompression." He announced. "Somewhere in the bridge."
"How do you know?"
Lind pointed to the clutter piled aft of any doorway or beam sticking out into the hallway. Plates, books, picture frames, food, garbage, tools, and any other item not stored or bolted down at the time of decompression hugged the eddies created in the
flow of air exploding out of the ship.
Beyond all the detritus, on the main door, center of mass, a crater punctured the inches-thick steel. The curling wedges, frozen in metal, tore outward down the length of the ship. Lind aimed his torch at it, snapping images with the camera built into his helmet.
"What the hell did that? A bullet?" The Hitchhiker asked.
"The blast door is almost half a foot thick. It would take a little more than a bullet to get through this. Maybe a meteorite."
"Have you ever seen a meteorite punch through something like this?"
"Yep." Lind left it at that. It wasn't something he intended to share with the stranger.
Pushing any thought of Kay from his mind, or any thought of the hissing decompression, or of the splatter of blood shooting through the cockpit into space as Lind fought to seal off the hull breach, he examined the door frame to find a way in.
"It'll be emergency sealed." The Hitchhiker added. "Even if the door was shut when this thing got hit, the locks would have engaged when the environmental system sensed the decompression."
Lind turned over his left shoulder, looking at the other man. "Look who decided to contribute."
"Well, this what I do. It's freaking me out to be here, I'm not going to lie to you. Focusing on something I know helps."
"I don't suppose you have a solution?"
The Hitchhiker aimed his torch at the floor. "Maybe. Most of these systems have a release in case the power goes out. The doors locked electronically. If there's a power failure, the electric locks release and mechanical once fall down. There should be a crank panel somewhere . . ."
He dropped to his knees, flipping up a small handle previously flush with the deck, and tugged. A small section of the floor came up with it. The Hitchhiker exposed a geared wheel with a hole for a wrench. Finding a broken pipe amongst the debris, he wedged it in. With one foot shoved against the nearest wall for leverage, he tugged until the wheel turned. Something clanked behind the door.
"That should do it. Try to get the door up."
Lind shoved with all of his weight. In inches, the door slid open. The damage kept it from opening all the way, but they created enough space that each could squeeze sideways into the bridge.
The body rested just inside the door, propped up against the aft bulkhead. He wore an oxygen mask, the small, clear kind kept in emergency kits scattered across most ships. Three discarded masks, the small air cartridges flashing red for empty, lay on one side. Two unused masks lay on the other, along with a seven small, withered, blackened objects.
The Hitchhiker jumped back to the doorway upon seeing the corpse. "Is he . . . is he alive?"
"Not even close."
The Hitchhiker cleared his throat several times, his gulps audible even through his helmet. "I'm not crazy about being around dead people." He pointed to items by the body. "What are those?"
"Fingers." Lind answered, looking more closely. Both hands were blackened and missing digits. "He got frostbite. It looks like he kept trying to put on masks but his fingers froze and fell off." He looked at the body. The only exposed skin were the frozen hands and a face missing a nose, ears, and lips, all victims of the extreme cold. A tag on the man's jumpsuit read "VASILY."
"Each of those masks lasts about six hours." Lind observed.
"He lay here for eighteen hours?"
"Looks like it." He stepped back from Vasily's body and looked around the bridge. "He must have gotten stuck in here when the blast door locked."
"I don't understand, there should be seven other guys on here. How come none of them tried to get him out?"
"Have you ever been in a decompressing ship?"
"Well, no."
"It's disconcerting." Lind answered flatly. "They probably panicked, forgot they could open the door, and ran for the lifeboats."
The torchlight bounced off of the inside of the viewport, except for a section, nearly a square foot in surface area, dead center from where whatever projectile catastrophically decompressed the Guppy. "I guess we have an entry wound." Lind said to himself. He moved on from the body towards the center console where he pressed non-responsive buttons in vain. "We've got to get the power back on. Any idea how we do that?"
The Hitchhiker shrugged. "Engineering, I guess. But we don't have any idea why the power's out."
"Go back there and take a look."
"By myself?"
Lind just stared at the man.
"All I'm saying is that anytime anyone splits up in the movies one guy ends up dead."
"This isn't the movies. There's nothing here, just Vasily." Lind pointed at the body. "And I don't think he cares right now."
The Hitchhiker hesitated, but backed into the corridor leading aft. Realizing the dark screens wouldn't tell him anything, Lind explored the rest of the ship.
He could see the Hitchhiker's bouncing light as he timidly made his way to the aft of the ship. Unlike his passenger, Lind made a point of looking into each of the compartments branching off from the main hall. Like the bridge, the ship sealed many rooms upon decompression, but the investigator quickly found the release levers. None were as complex as the five-inch thick blast door, nor as heavy. Most of the forward compartments held crew living quarters. Personal items still sat where a panicked crew had abandoned them. Most of the rooms bore the haphazard organization of long-term, compact habitation. Photos of family members, clothes, and trinkets insignificant to anyone but their owners occupied most surfaces, scattered from the decompression. Closer to the corridor, objects too heavy to be sucked forward with the depleting oxygen littered the open spaces. In most places, the crew had just disappeared, the evidence of their lives frozen aboard the Guppy.
But Lind found nothing relevant.
The lights came on while Lind poked around the galley. A burst of celebratory laughter echoed forward from the engine compartment. When he arrived at its source, the Hitchhiker stood, beaming, amongst a mass of wires and cables.
"I see you finally figured it out." It had been nearly two hours since they boarded the ship.
Still smiling, the mechanic replied. "Sure did. We'll barely get enough power for the lights and a computer or two."
"Any idea what did it?"
The Hitchhiker nodded, suddenly grave after his demonstration of pride. "Something polarized the power distribution node. It got overloaded and fried itself."
"What would do that?"
"A really, really bad solar flare would do it. Some kind of electromagnetic field could have fried it, too."
"We'd probably know if there was a solar flare that bad. And it would be one helluva coincidence for the ship to get fried by a random storm and hit by a random micrometeorite right after each other."
"The overload happened after the meteorite strike." The Hitchhiker quickly corrected. "As soon as the power kicked back on, the emergency air tried to come on."
"So it was running when the power failed."
"Yeah. I had to shut it off. I jury-rigged the system pretty good, but it can't handle that kind of load."
"Ok, I'm going to head to the bridge to pull whatever I can from the computer."
Lind turned to leave the engineering compartment when the Hitchhiker called after him. "Hey, man, before you leave. You might want to take a look at this." The mechanic walked to the far end of the compartment. The bulkhead between the compartment and the engine was nearly a meter thick, protection in case the engine nacelles ever failed. Dead center, a crater the size of Lind's hand bubbled out.
The investigator pulled out a multi-tool, extending the pair of pliers. He picked at the center of the crater until he came up with a wafer-thin glob of metal. Lind stuck it in a plastic evidence bag and shoved it into his suit pocket. It weighed down his pocket far more than he would have expected. A glance over his shoulder had a straight shot to the bridge door and the hole in the windscreen.
"Is that the meteorite?" The Hitchhiker asked.
"What's left of it." Lind
lied. He couldn't tell the man the truth, that the scrap was about as natural as the strike on the ship. It wasn't a random chuck of rock or shard of debris. It was a slug. A bullet sent the ship into decompression. A very large, very hard bullet.
Cutting off any further conversation on the topic, Lind walked out of the engine room, mentioning over his shoulder that he headed to the bridge to download the ship's log onto a tablet.
With the emergency lights on, the Guppy's control center didn't seem as sinister as it had first on their arrival. Almost bright, with screens and panels once again illuminated, only the exposure to space and the dead body in the corner hinted at the tragedy that had occurred. After he found an outlet, the investigator stuck a portable hard drive into the main computer and copied nearly the entire database. He scanned the files he could find while the rest of the data transferred.
Within two minutes, he confirmed that the ship was the same one that had stopped at Iapetus station only hours before his own arrival. The stop had been unscheduled, which wasn't surprising since the huge Guppies typically only made port at one station per planetary system. Above the moon, they took possession of one crate, nearly ten meters long yet only a meter thick, destined for Io. Obviously, the ship carried the supposedly indestructible yet broken Comb. Both ships connected to the incident on Iapetus suffered catastrophic failures and loss of life.
Distracted and impatient, he took another look around the bridge. Vasily still lay in the corner. The masks, both empty and unused, told of a man still desperate to live. Something behind the pile of oxygen masks reflected the glowing ceiling lights. Lind delicately looked around the corpse, not wanting to disturb the body. A personal data pad was wedged behind his thigh. Almost on a whim, Lind tugged it free. The body shook and threatened to fall over as he did so. Lind tapped the power button, but nothing happened. It must have gotten fried like all the rest of the electronics on board. The data pad went into Lind's cargo pocket at about the time the computer beeped to let him know the file transfer was complete. Before leaving the bridge, he checked the navigation computer and noted the coordinates where the lifeboats had been jettisoned.