“I’ll need a few minutes to sort out the details, Captain,” Perez said, frowning at the readouts on his tablet’s screen. As an astrophysicist and the ship’s chief engineer, he was best qualified to interpret the flood wave of information the ship’s systems were generating. “But I can tell you now that we are well and thoroughly screwed.”
Betty, as the ground crew christened the ship, had performed admirably up to that point. Only six days from reaching Mars, the fully automated ship allowed Cole and the other scientists to concentrate on running a gamut of zero-g experiments in their respective fields. They were trained to perform minor repairs and maintenance, but were hardly prepared to deal with any major crises.
“Good old Murphy’s Law strikes again,” Perez declared after he finished analyzing the data. “Except that instead of dropping my toast butter side down, this time I’m going to suffocate to death. Bloody perfect.”
Perez threw his tablet against the cabin wall, but the lack of gravity robbed him of whatever small satisfaction he might have hoped to gain from the gesture. The rest of the crew watched in silence as the tablet spun sluggishly toward the wall, bounced off and hovered there, rotating slowly along its axis. Saravia’s hand found Perez’ and held on tight. Eventually the engineer regained his composure enough to snatch back the gadget and share the bad news with his crewmates.
“We got hit by a swarm of meteoroids. The ship ran into dozens of them, traveling at an incredible velocity. A few were real huge mothers, as big as half a meter in diameter. Both water tanks were punctured. It will take a while for all of the water to escape, but once it all goes, the ship’s systems will have nothing to generate oxygen from, and then we’re done.”
Anderson mulled over the news. “How long?”
“A few hours, tops. Definitely not the six days we’d need,” Perez replied.
Saravia tried to brush a strand of hair away from her eyes, her hand bumping against a helmet instead. As a biologist she had not spent a lot of time in a spacesuit either.
“What are we supposed to do now? There wasn’t anything like this in our training scenarios,” she said.
“No reason why there should have been,” Perez responded in a much calmer, almost clinical tone. Cole could practically see the engineer struggling to keep his emotions in check. “The likelihood of being hit by even a single space rock large enough to do any damage is nearly zero. A situation like this… Well, it’s like getting struck by lightning a dozen times in a row. Just our luck.”
In space travel every design has to be straightforward, efficient and have plenty of built in redundancies. Betty’s systems were relatively simple. Water was stored in two enormous tanks on the outer layer of the ship and its molecules were split into oxygen and hydrogen. Hydrogen was cooled and converted into liquid form, then used as fuel for the ship’s engine. Oxygen was vented into the ship’s atmosphere. Two separate tanks each contained enough water for the journey, just in case one of them was somehow damaged en route. No one anticipated that anything might take out both tanks at once.
“Can we patch up one of the water containers before it’s too late?” asked Anderson.
Perez shook his head. “Even if we had the right tools we couldn’t make the repairs quickly enough for it to matter.”
“Well then,” the Captain chewed on his lower lip. “What other options have we got?”
“I should be able to write a program that would allocate the remaining oxygen supply to one section of the ship,” said Cole. “If we divert all that’s left to the pods there is a reasonable chance that their life support systems will hold out long enough to reach Mars. That’s assuming I can finish the code before the air runs out.”
Anderson looked around the small module, staring at each of his crew with grim determination. He appeared to be handling himself better than the rest of them, but just barely.
“So it’s us or them, then?” Anderson said.
“There is no us in this scenario,” Cole said evenly. “The colonists consume far less oxygen while in suspended animation than we do.”
“Per person, yes,” Anderson said. “But there are over a hundred pods. That’s a lot of air.”
“I can’t believe we are having this conversation,” Janet raised her voice. “There are a hundred and twenty people in the pod module. Even if there was a way to somehow survive at their expense, I for one couldn’t consider that.”
“You couldn’t, huh?” Anderson was getting visibly angry. “And what about eight hundred people who are already on Mars? They desperately need the cargo we are hauling. We owe it to them to try and stay alive, to make sure the ship gets there in one piece.”
“I want to live as much as anyone,” Perez said. “But the ship does not need us to deliver its cargo. Any malfunction that needs manual repairs is very unlikely. You know this.”
“I think today’s events are a very solid argument against that. It’s my decision to make, as Captain. Write that program, Cole, but have the remaining air vented into this module.”
“You can’t do that,” Janet pleaded. “Just because they aren’t awake to defend themselves does not give you the right to sacrifice them!”
“Look,” Cole tried to appease his superior, “there are all kinds of fail safes I would have to disable in the ship’s programming in order to cut the oxygen flow to the pods.”
That is, if I could even bring myself to obey that order, Cole thought.
“It would take more time than we have left,” he said. “Let’s do the right thing and make sure all those people survive, even if we don’t.”
Anderson did not respond immediately. Cole watched as the Captain sat in silence for a full minute, his jaw clenched tight. Anderson’s years in the military must have taught him duty, but he also learned survival, and the two motivations must have been battling it out within the man. Anderson studied the faces of his three companions and found no support, only fear and defiance. Very slowly, Anderson got up from his seat.
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly. Then he reached into one of his suit’s pockets, produced a small pistol and shot Janet in the head at near point blank range.
For a very long moment no one moved. Cole and Perez were too stunned to act. Janet’s body floated backward as the bullet’s momentum sent her spiraling toward the back of the module. Drops of blood mixed with the shattered splinters of her helmet floated freely in zero g.
Perez growled an almost primal cry of grief and rage and threw himself at Anderson. He had no chance. Before he could reach the older man, Anderson fired two more shots straight into the engineer’s chest. Cole was slower to overcome the initial shock. He was only beginning to move as Perez’s lifeless body slammed into his midsection. By the time he untangled himself, Anderson had the gun leveled squarely at him.
“Don’t,” Anderson warned. “Just… don’t.”
Anderson leaned back against the wall of the module, as far away from Cole and the dead crewmen as he could get in such a small space. His hands were trembling but he held on tightly to the gun, ready to react to anything Cole might attempt. The two men stared at each other across the room.
“Now,” Anderson said. “Write your program. Disconnect the pods.”
“You are insane,” Cole whispered.
“Look, there was no other way. Even after we diverted the oxygen from the pods, there wouldn’t have been enough air for all four of us. Two people could maybe get by on what’s left.”
“So you murder two people in cold blood for a long shot at saving your own skin.”
“You said it yourself, Cole - they were going to die in a few hours anyway. Think what you want of me, but know that I will go to whatever lengths I have to in order to get to Mars. Did you ever wonder why I fought so hard to be selected for this mission?”
Cole said nothing.
“My daughter is one of the colonists,” said Anderson. “She’s been there from the very beginning, from before they installed the good
shielding on the domes. Like all the pioneers, she was exposed to too much radiation, and now she’s paying for it. Linda needs a kidney transplant to live, and she’s too sick to fly back to Earth. There’s no matching donor at the colony – too few people there altogether. But I’m a match, and my kidneys work fine.”
“I’m sorry about your daughter. I really am. But she knew what she was getting into when she joined up. You might as well shoot me now,” Cole said defiantly. “Because I am not going to help you trade the lives of all those people for a chance to save her.”
“Oh come on, Brett. There is no sense in being a dead hero. And if this will help soothe your conscience any, you should know that if I do have to shoot you, I am going to go in there and try to jury-rig the oxygen feed manually. It probably wouldn’t work, but I will roll the dice on that if I have to, and the colonists are going to die anyway.”
Cole had no doubt that Anderson wasn’t bluffing. He was desperate enough to try anything, do anything, at this point. Cole nodded reluctantly and sat down in front of one of the consoles.
Cole struggled to enter lines of code into his tablet as fast as his gloved hands would allow. The gadget was designed to be operated in such an environment with relative ease, but his hands were not exactly steady as he tried to manipulate the touch screen.
His mind kept wondering back to the morning of the ship’s launch. “A Better Tomorrow isn’t just a fancy name for a vessel,” said the NASA chief during one the pre-launch speeches, “it is the core idea on which the Mars colony program is based. The colonists leave behind all the petty squabbles and centuries-old problems our planet has been mired in. They leave behind their past for a chance to start anew, a fresh start, and a better tomorrow for themselves, and for all of humanity.”
Pretty words, and a noble sentiment, thought Cole, but Anderson did not leave his survival of the fittest mentality behind, and it was up to Cole to make certain that the colonists had any kind of tomorrow at all.
Above all else, he had to protect the pods. He was reasonably certain that Anderson did not understand system-level programming well enough to actually follow what he was doing, so he wrote routines that would divert all remaining oxygen to the pods, as he had intended in the first place. The tricky part was to time everything just right, to deny Anderson any other options. The Captain was visibly edgy and impatient, but coercing Cole’s cooperation had remained his best bet.
Uninterrupted, Cole finished the necessary programming. He was running out the clock, buying precious minutes and looking for anything within the ship’s controls that would give him some sort of an advantage. He needed to act soon, before Anderson’s patience finally ran out. Cole braced himself and launched the program.
All lights and monitors in the control module—including the tablets—went out simultaneously. At the same time, a speaker in Anderson’s helmet delivered a piercing noise so loud it was likely going to cause permanent damage to the man’s eardrums. Disoriented, Anderson lost precious seconds muting the sound. Cole was on the move the moment the lights shut off. Momentarily blind and deaf, Anderson could only guess at where exactly the scientist might be in the module.
As Anderson struggled to regain his composure, a very small amount of light entered the control module. The door leading to crew quarters had opened. Anderson pushed himself toward the exit in pursuit, but the transfer compartment that connected the control module to quarters was empty. Before Anderson could turn around Cole slammed into him from the back, hurtling the Captain deeper into the transfer compartment. By the time Anderson found his bearings, the pressurized door was already closing in front of him.
On its own, the door would not hold Anderson for very long. Each door could be opened manually, as per one of the spaceship’s many safety precautions. However, another safety feature prevented both module doors in the transfer compartment to ever be opened at the same time. Cole programmed the crew quarter door to open just as soon as the control module entrance was shut.
Anderson rushed to the other side of the small compartment and manually closed the other door, but before he could make it back across, Cole’s program opened the crew quarters door again. The program forced the crew quarter entrance to keep opening repeatedly. Unable to seal it permanently from inside the transfer compartment, Anderson was trapped on the wrong side of the ship.
With very little air remaining in his suit, Cole rushed across several modules back to the pods. The oxygen was already being funneled directly to the life support system for the men and women in suspended animation, blissfully unaware of the danger they were in. Cole could not be absolutely sure that the amount of oxygen the ship could generate and store before losing all of its remaining water would be enough to see them safely into Mars orbit, but at least now they had a fighting chance.
Back in the pods module Cole sealed the transfer compartment behind him and took off his helmet. The air in the large module was thin but still breathable. Cole used his tablet to send out a brief message explaining the situation. The Mars colony would have six days to prepare a rescue party and retrieve A Better Tomorrow once it arrived in orbit.
Standing at the center of the module was the one empty pod that Cole was running experiments on earlier that day. He spent countless hours back on Earth working with this machine. During this flight he froze lab mice dozens of times and was able to revive them hours and even days later – usually. Cole stripped off the rest of his clothes and climbed into the pod. He struggled to attach the necessary sensors and tubes to his own body. The odds weren’t in his favor, but they sure beat the alternative.
Cole braced himself and activated the final part of his program. The lid snapped closed and the temperature inside his pod began to drop.
I imagined this near-future thriller as an Outer Limits episode, down to a cut scene from later in the episode as the opening.
It was originally published in Interstellar Fiction.
HUNGER
The first bullet hit the trunk of a tree, a few feet off target. Gart dove to the right, crashing into the bushes as he heard more shots being fired. The bullets missed him, but the thick brush took its toll in hair and blood where his bulky frame tore through; plenty for the hounds to follow.
It had been days since he had any sustenance at all. Constantly on the move and staying just barely ahead of the hunters, he had no time to look for a meal. Even now he had a more immediate problem. He needed to throw the dogs off his scent.
His luck held out. There was a stream, just a few feet wide, but enough for his purpose. He crossed over and lingered on the other side for a few moments, to create a false trail. He then returned to the stream, walked in and waded downstream, an ice-cold current nudging him along. Neither hounds nor trackers could follow his path as long as he stayed in the water.
Gart remained in the stream for an hour, his fur-covered skin barely registering just how cold the water had been. It felt more like days. Hunger was an overwhelming presence now, an enemy as deadly as the hunters. It made him weak and sluggish, and unable to keep up his pace.
A few years ago Gart had been a myth. Humans rarely met his kind, and an occasional sighting was dismissed by the skeptics. They were called yeti, abominable snowmen, and a dozen other names in remote areas where a chance encounter might take place. But the world kept shrinking – humans explored and populated much of the land that was too forbidding and harsh to their ancestors. Their discovery became inevitable.
At first, humans were elated. They realized the dream of contact with another intelligent species, one that shared the same world with them all along. It was a time of wonder and limitless possibilities, and it did not last. Things turned out badly once humans learned just a little more about Gart’s tribe. Once it was discovered how they fed.
Fortune continued to favor Gart. Tired and malnourished as he was, he managed to trap a squirrel. The small rodent trembled in his grip, life energy flowing from it and into Gart, until the squirrel wa
s too weak to continue struggling. Soon, only its emaciated body remained. Gart discarded it carefully, so that remnants of his meal would not betray his whereabouts.
Gart thought he might be the last of his kind, but he could not be sure. He only knew that he had been running for a long time, longer than one might expect in a land so densely populated by humans. When it was discovered that Gart’s people fed directly on the life energy of other living beings, the humans’ reaction was immediate and brutal. They evoked vampires and demons as they hunted down and killed members of Gart’s race. It was ironic, Gart thought, that beings sustained by consuming dead animal flesh would assign such opprobrium to his ways.
The squirrel’s tiny essence did not make for a satisfying meal. Soon, he would again be in danger of collapsing from starvation. He stalked through the forest, looking for larger game, the hunter and the hunted at the same time.
The forest receded before him, revealing a clearing and a small human settlement. One house stood much closer to the trees than the rest. On its porch, a boy of about fourteen played a portable video game. Gart watched him from the brush, only a few heartbeats away.
Gart observed the child at play, so young and vibrant, and full of life essence he badly needed.
His thoughts kept returning to when he was of that young age, and to his father’s lessons. “We have no quarrel with men,” father used to say as the children sat in the semi-circle under the stars. “They are our younger siblings, and so we forgive their impulsiveness, their aggression, their many other imperfections, as we wait patiently for them to grow up.” This was years before the contact, before all the death and destruction these “younger siblings” had wrought. Gart thought of the last time he saw his father, the graying body riddled with bullets after he drew the human soldiers away and bought a few extra moments for his family to get away.
Very slowly, Gart began to move toward the house.
Explaining Cthulhu to Grandma and Other Stories Page 33