by Matt Thomas
He nearly bumped into the Hitchhiker as he tried to squeeze through the partially opened door. Annoyed, he not so gently pushed the other man back.
"Did you get anything?" The Hitchhiker asked.
"Yep." Lind held up the external drive as proof. "We've got two more tasks. First, we need to get into the cargo hold."
"Okay . . ."
"We're looking for the Comb they picked up on Iapetus. You know what that looks like?"
The Hitchhiker gave him a look of shock that Lind had asked the question. "Yeah. Of course I know what it looks like."
"Good. Help me out then."
The entry into the cargo hold, halfway down the length of the ship, dropped through the floor. A small compartment turned Lind's stomach as he lowered himself through the disorienting transition between artificial gravity and complete weightlessness. As much as he hated it, he held back the nausea if for no other reason than to not struggle in front of the Hitchhiker.
Hand under hand, they lowered themselves between clumps of crates secured by cargo nets. Each giant plastic container held in place by heavy straps could contain equipment or supplies weighing dozens of tons. The absence of artificial gravity permitted Lind to shift them with relatively little effort. Lind started forward, and the Hitchhiker started aft. One by one, they checked each container, looking for a tracking number to match the data Lind had pulled from the computer. Once they met in the middle, they continued past one another, double-checking the work to ensure nothing got overlooked. The expected size and shape of the crate should have made that piece of cargo conspicuous, but they took no chances.
It took over an hour, but they found nothing.
"Did it get stolen?" The Hitchhiker asked as they pulled themselves up into the Guppy's living area.
"Well, we saw the outside. Someone swung by and broke in."
"I saw all kinds of shit down there. Food, computers, different equipment. Millions of dollars worth of stuff that's probably easier to get out. Why would anyone steal a broken Comb out of a derelict ship?"
Rather than answer, Lind climbed back up to the ship's spine. He needed the bridge. Answering the Hitchhiker's question would show too much of his hand. Strangely, Lind had to suppress the urge to talk about his theory. His mouth even opened, not that the man trailing behind him could see it, but it took an active force to keep himself from saying anything. Sharing opinion had always been a part of his routine. Kay never pulled punches, always shooting down the most ridiculous of ideas, and challenging the good ones until they both came to a practical solution. Even after a few days together, with Lind loosening the constraints on his uninvited guest, only paranoia and frustration kept him from speaking his mind.
Once they made it topside, the Hitchhiker struggled to keep up. When they didn't turn into the airlock that would have taken them back to the Mako, the Hitchhiker's questioning took a different track.
"What was the second thing you needed my help with?"
Lind squeezed through the ajar hatch before replying. "Getting Vasily into the freezer."
CHAPTER EIGHT
Using information gathered from Natalia's computer, Lind calculated that the lifeboats should have been close by. His navigation computer gave him a few likely points, and he set a course for what he hoped to be a rescue mission. He kept his eyes locked to the sensors, which took little concentration since the Hitchhiker remained strangely silent.
Moving Vasily' corpse, squeezing it through the partially open blast door, watching bits of flesh frozen to brittleness flake off with each jostle between the bridge and the Mako's refrigerator, must have disturbed the Hitchhiker. For over two hours, he remained silent, staring into space while they sped towards the calculated location of the lifeboats. He didn't question their departure from the Guppy, leaving it adrift with little more than a marker buoy and a message to Lind's headquarters.
Lind enjoyed the first few minutes of silence, temporarily forgetting about the stranger sitting in the chair next to him. Eventually, however, he became worried about the other's sudden catatonia. Twice, he tried to breach the subject, wondering if, perhaps, it was the man's first such experience with death. Neither time had the man replied.
Those who sought jobs out in the system, away from the familiar and safe comforts of Earth, tended to he a hearty lot. A certain cavalier attitude, toughened by years of self-reliance and hard work, was the norm, particularly at the more remote locations like Iapetus. Lind's own experience warned him that something happened in the Hitchhiker's mind other than a sudden and personal confrontation with human mortality. He could not, for the life of him, figure out what it was.
After such a long silence, Lind fell into an old habit of talking to himself. "We should see them by now." He wondered aloud, not realizing he had actually spoken the words until the Hitchhiker replied.
"The lifeboats?"
"Yeah. They should be broadcasting a distress beacon and flashing all kinds of lights."
"Maybe the calculations were wrong." The Hitchhiker suggested. They closed in on the epicenter of the search grid, and Lind began to doubt his own data. Just as he was about to move on to a different search area, his sensors picked up something nearby.
"I've got two objects, pretty close to each other less than a hundred kilometers out." The distance closed, but still they couldn't see any signs of the lifeboats. The search lights flicked on and scanned.
They appeared as a reflection, light bouncing off intentionally visible paint. Closer in, the squat spheres appeared dull despite the bright livery designed to attract attention either on the surface of the planet or in the blackness of space.
"Why are there no lights?"
"I imagine the same thing that killed the power on the Guppy killed the power on the lifeboats." Lind answered.
"But, with no power, the lifeboats . . ." The voice trailed off, not wanting to voice the possibilities. Several days of drifting, without air scrubbers or heat, eliminated hope of finding any part of the crew alive.
The nearest lifeboat spun slowly. The gap in the paint, appearing and disappearing with each rotation, told Lind all he needed to know. It took some time and maneuvering before the Mako could grab onto the lifeboat and stabilize it. Rather than suit up, Lind extended a robotic arm to conduct the examination.
As they watched through the cockpit display, the camera confirmed what Lind suspected. Explosive bolts had blown the hatch off.
"I don't understand. Why would the hatch have blown? Did it short out or something?"
The investigator ignored the question while he moved the camera inside. It took several passes before he found anything useful. Barely noticeable, a red smudge, rounded and barely visible, could be seen on the rear bulkhead above an acceleration couch. The camera panned around towards the hatch. Scorched metal marked where explosive bolts shot the hatch into space. A small door, bright red, hung open next to the missing hatch, a yellow lever jutted into the interior from behind it.
"They blew the emergency hatch from the inside?" The Hitchhiker hyperventilated. "Why would they do that? Why would they decompress themselves? They could have been rescued . . ." Gasps for breath interfered with the man's words until only wheezes escaped.
"They were so far outside any kind of high traffic area. We only found them because we were effectively following their route." Lind tried to explain the suicide as much as he could. "They must have known that they'd die in there. No air, no power, no transmitter to get help. They must have figured it was better to go fast than to suffocate."
"I don't understand . . ." The Hitchhiker repeated, not bringing up the bloodstained walls. One occupant had fought to stay alive, and the others wouldn't allow it. Lind had seen it before. Rarely, but it happened. Tough crewmen talked about their final option if they were stranded, and some had the wherewithal to see it though. Lind wasn't sure he would call it courage, but it took a certain force of will to choose death by decompression as the lesser of two evils.
"Where are they?" The Hitchhiker spoke with effort through his gasps.
"They could be anywhere."
"How are we going to find them?"
"We're not." Lind grew irritated at his companion's distress. "There's no way to know how far the bodies have gotten. It's finding a grain of sand in the ocean."
"So they're just going to float out there?"
"Yep."
"Forever."
"Yep."
The Hitchhiker shook, not with anger, but at the thought of his body drifting in space, perfectly preserved, for practical eternity. The Thirty-Two still couldn't understand such an extreme response to their deaths, but he knew he had to say something to get the man to snap back to reality. "Maybe there're survivors on the second lifeboat."
It took only a few minutes to release the lifeboat and proceed to the other only a few kilometers away. The hatch remained intact, from what they could tell. Five minutes later, Lind stood, alone, in the airlock, facing hull of the lifeboat. A few twists of the locking mechanism and a tug on the handle swung the door outward.
The feed from his camera connected to screen in the forensics lab, watched by the Hitchhiker he had forced to stay behind. While a radio connected them, Lind had turned the volume down to a whisper so he could more easily ignore the running commentary. It took a moment to center himself before stepping into the scene he expected.
Four people barely fit into a lifeboat that size although it technically could have held one more. The entire interior was only eighteen cubic meters. Seats, cut along the wall, shoulder-to-shoulder, once held half of the Guppy's crew. Those four individuals now hovered, gray and lifeless, bouncing off the bulkheads and each other.
His helmet told him that the temperature inside was cold, freezing even, but nothing close to the almost absolute zero outside. Their body heat had kept them warm for some time. Only carbon dioxide remained in the air.
"Well, I guess it's not the worst way to go." Lind said aloud, forgetting about the panicked man back in the ship listening.
The bodies challenged that thought, though. One, the smallest, only five foot four inches and weighing about a hundred and fifty pounds, still had his eyes open. His hands clenched near his chest, ten red streaks tore at the collar of his work uniform, each streak corresponding to a finger missing the flesh at the tip. Looking back at the door, Lind saw the spots where the dying man pawed at the hatch like a dog trying to get under a fence. He either tried to open the door in delirium, or he tried to kill himself after watching his comrades die.
Like a grave robber, Lind checked the pockets on each corpse, looking for something that might help. He came up with nothing but lint and litter. The sets of matching coveralls had name tapes, just like Vasily's on the Guppy. Lind took photos of each lifeless face and nametape for his records. For good measure, he took DNA samples from each, a challenging task in weightlessness. The job complete, he stepped back into the airlock of his own ship. As he closed the door, one corpse floated towards him and Lind had to shove the body back into the lifeboat before closing the hatch.
"What are you doing? Aren't we going to put them in storage?" The Hitchhiker protested and Lind climbed out of his suit.
"There's no room."
"What do you mean there's no room?"
"You saw the cooler, there's space for two bodies. We have one body in there, and there are four on that lifeboat. There's no room."
Lind shoved his way passed the Hitchhiker on his way to the cockpit. He was followed.
"We can't just leave them out here! We've left them all out here!"
He'd had enough. With both hands, he grabbed the other man's collar and shoved him against the cockpit door frame. "Look, there's nothing I can do about it. People die out here. They die every fucking day. Most of the time, their bodies don't make it home. There's nothing left in there but a bunch of fucking meat. Not everyone gets a funeral. Not everybody gets to die in a bed. I'm sorry you never learned that before, but that's life. I don't have any fucking room for these people, and I can't tow that lifeboat all the way to Io. We're not leaving them here because I'm a fucking sociopath. We're leaving them here because I don't have another fucking choice. So get your shit together and let me do my fucking job!"
As their eyes met, the Hitchhiker's fear turned from fear of death to fear of a person. He backed away, sliding between Lind and the bulkhead until he felt safer.
"Look, I'm sorry." Lind admitted. "I'm not pissed at you. I mean, I am pissed at you, but it's not your fault. You got stuck doing this with me. It sucks having to deal with one dead guy, much less five dead guys. Look, I'll mark the coordinates and send them out. The next larger ship coming through here will stop, put them in storage, and take them home. As far as the other five, the ones who . . . who we didn't find. There's not a lot I can do about that. I'm sorry."
The Hitchhiker stared at him for a long time, but Lind didn't feel like he was being probed for the truth. He had done enough interrogations to know when someone wanted to say something. For all the things Lind learned to handle, he never learned how to lend a sympathetic ear to someone who needed to talk. He didn't want to hear a grown man telling him about his innermost fears of dying alone or whatever. Lind's face must have conveyed his feelings, because the Hitchhiker kept whatever he had bottled up inside and said simply "okay" before retreating into Kay's — his — cabin.
Left alone, Lind returned to the cockpit and released the lifeboat. He watched it drift away, dark, powerless, yet another bit of debris lost in the solar system. He waited until it fell out of sight before resuming his course.
CHAPTER NINE
As much as he hated to admit it, and would never do so in front of his guest, the rising body count shook Lind. Not as much as it shook the Hitchhiker, but he struggled with it nonetheless. He'd seen his share of death in his job, the suicides, the accidents, even a few murders, but nothing strung so many corpses together in so many locations. There had been the Dolphin transport sixteen months into the job, with its failed reactor, explosive decompression, and almost three dozen dead. He'd found the bodies of people marooned, like that Flounder that crash-landed on the surface of Io and wasn't found for three weeks. The captain of that ship resorted to cannibalism before rescue.
None of those mass deaths resulted from someone's intent. This was different. Whatever damaged the Comb on Iapetus had killed nine so far, and, Lind suspected, nearly killed him in the maintenance bay.
He remembered the tablet he took from the Guppy's bridge. Feeling safe enough to leave the cockpit while the Hitchhiker sulked in the cabin, he left for the forensics lab. Plugging the tablet into his computer, he made a mirror-image of the hard drive to preserve as evidence. Even though the tablet itself was dead, he could now access the files.
A cluster of people, smiling on a rocky beach, popped up the second the tablet powered on. Lying on the bridge, in near absolute zero, with his fingers breaking off, Vasily looked at photos of home and family. With flesh intact, Lind hardly recognized the man now lying in the ship's morgue. Sliding through image after image, Lind saw the life left behind, and felt the last thoughts of someone about to die. Had the photos brought distress at the loss, or satisfaction and appreciate for the life he had lived? Lind knew no amount of digging would unearth an answer.
Almost reverently, he closed the folder, minimizing the thumbnails so he wouldn't further intrude on Vasily's last memories. He ran a search for the most recent files, hoping to find some clue as to the ship's loss. Surprisingly, he found a video file, dated only four days before, after the ship lost all its oxygen. Half-expecting to see Vasily saying goodbye to his family, he played the film.
What he found was not a tearful farewell, but an accident. The screen first looked black, like the lens had been facing down. Then, light flickered, bouncing off of portions of the beams. The illumination came from the outside, a spotlight on the cockpit passing through the broken windscreen to cast shadows along the bulkheads. The
frame on the screen swayed rapidly, like Vasily ran with the device in his hand. A reflection in a dead computer screen showed the tablet's flash on. The crew member had turned on the device to try to attract attention, not realizing he had also turned on the video recorder.
On the screen, the interior of the bridge turned into space. Off in the distance, a ship approached, identified by the light-source. Running lights outlined enough of the incoming ship for Lind to identify its type. Another Mako, just like the one that came to Rykov's ersatz rescue in orbit around Iapetus. The ship slowed to a stop, turning its spotlight beneath the bridge, presumably towards the cargo door. Lind watched a dizzying display as Vasily tried to get the pilot's attention. Eventually, the pilot did, in fact, emerge from the back of his ship. Using a thruster pack, the figure cruised towards the Guppy.
Vasily's efforts doubled, and the camera bounced around wildly while the crewman waved his hands. Finally, the crew member got the other's attention. The moving figure stopped. He rotated himself to look at the distressed man behind a fractured view port. For several seconds, he stared directly at Vasily, and the camera.
Then he turned away, and went back to his work, out of view.
Vasily dropped the tablet, its camera now facing the ceiling. Lind watched as Vasily's face contort in a cry for help. With his hands, already cracked and turning black, he pounded on the floor of the deck. He stomped and kicked at the door. While there was no sound without air, Lind watched Vasily scream at the top of his lungs, a desperate move for someone with finite oxygen supplies.
After tiring himself out and cracking his hands bloody, Vasily grabbed the tablet again. When he did, his face got close to the camera and Lind got a full-framed looked at the man before his death. The frostbite had set in, making the skin around the oxygen mask dried and flaking. His uncreased brow and cheeks reinforced his youth. Red veins nearly obscured the steel blue of his eyes, bracketed the dark circles of one who knew his fate. Something behind them, hidden by the terror, showed a determination to live. In a way, Lind was proud of the young man for continuing to fight despite the odds, despite the loss of his shipmates, and despite the apathy of the man in the other ship.