Seclurm: Devolution

by Noah Gallagher

  This large room, unlike the mineral storage rooms, was confined and claustrophobic, with the same perforated metal floors as the catwalk, a thin space to walk through, and an array of pipes and mechanisms forming walls on either side. It was even warmer than the rest of the lower floor, and Rosalyn actually began to sweat. Smelling oil and steam, Rosalyn had a hard time figuring out which direction to go. With Al’s lead, they turned a corner to the big engine, or one of the pieces of it, at least. Here there was a ladder leading to another level below, allowing access to more parts of the machinery.

  “Holy crap, Al—is it always this hot in here?” breathed Rosalyn as she wiped her brow.

  “No, actually: only when the engines are running at full blast. Which they can’t be.” What little confidence he still had started to drain away.

  “I suspect the disturbance will be on the lower level,” said SNTNL, its voice heavily muffled by the overwhelming noise of the engine humming and air pumping. “Whatever has happened, it’s happened to the other engine as well—I’m getting identical reports from each.”

  Rosalyn swung herself onto the ladder and climbed down quickly, followed by Al, who stored his wrench between his backside and his belt as he did. The bare skin of his torso glistened with sweat. The metal was hot to the touch, but both of them managed to shrug off the pain. Al steeled himself for what they might see, hoping he wouldn’t prove himself incompetent in front of his captain.

  “What’s going on now?” Rosalyn said to herself as she examined the metal-paneled face of the bottom half of this engine. The heat was nearly unbearable. Al almost said something, but he stopped dumbfounded in his tracks as he caught sight of the engine. Rosalyn didn’t know as much as Al, Sam, or Mitchell did about engines and the like, but she was still struck with horror when she looked above her and saw the damage done.

  The engine itself was alright for the most part, aside from a few gashes and scrapes. Those, Al recognized with relief, weren’t too bad and could be fixed. What wasn’t alright was the coolant pipe. Usually, it would connect from one end, the coolant system, to the other, the engine. But almost all of it was completely gone, somehow ripped off on both ends. The coolant system had automatically shut off in response to the system failure, but the engines had not. Despite having been running at low power, they had heated up drastically by this point.

  “S-SNTNL, shut off the engines!” she barked, hoping to be heard over the noise.

  “It’s done,” it said.

  The horrendous heat finally began to die down, allowing them to examine the damage for several minutes. Al took note of what exactly was wrong, scratching his head and grimacing at it all, realizing that this specific and identifiable problem was really little comfort after all.

  As the two climbed up the ladder and made their way out, the heat that had borne down on them died down to nothing, and there again came the feeling, like a ghost, of the oppressive cold of space.

  6

  Mitchell, Al, Terri, Sam, and Randy stood close to the window of the Bridge, some looking out anxiously at the sweeping, foggy landscapes outside, others leaning against the railing or sitting in chairs at computer stations. All felt heavy and torpid. Rosalyn sat in the captain’s chair reviewing the state of the engines on the screen before her, confirming their fears. Both engines had sustained minor damage and had had their coolant systems compromised. Without the engines on, the ship’s systems were powered only by the SNTNL mainframe.

  “No sign of Shauna anywhere. Engines damaged. What’s going to happen next?” complained Randy as he sat down at his chair and rested his chin on his hands.

  Everyone was tired, anxious, and unshowered. Most had gone back to put on their day clothes, but none of them looked ready for even a standard day, much less one as awful as this. That foreboding cavern entrance outside was clearly displayed through the window panels. It seemed as if it extended a beckoning hand to them, daring them to return and discover yet more mayhem within.

  “I just want to know what happened to Shauna,” Terri said, biting her lip. She sat in her chair exhaustedly. With a bit of rebellious apathy she had opted to remain in her pajamas, at least until she could take a shower.

  “If FAER doesn’t tell us we can start for home pronto, they’re out of their minds,” said Randy.

  Mitchell’s eyes blinked open wide as he looked at Randy. “You don’t get it,” he said with alarm. “The coolant system is broken!”

  Randy looked at him and shrugged defensively. “I’m not an engineer. I assume that means we’ll need to take our speed down a few notches?”

  “No,” said Sam with a frown. “We can’t use the engines for any meaningful amount of time.”

  “They were on at low level earlier, weren’t they?”

  “Yeah, but even that was building up tremendous heat over time,” Rosalyn answered. “I had to shut it down or else face a ship-wide meltdown.”

  Randy started to grasp the real gravity of the situation. He licked his lips. “C-can’t we just cut the engines and drift until they cool down, and repeat that? That’ll get us somewhere.”

  She shook her head. “There’s no way we’re even leaving the atmosphere with the engines on low power.”

  He frowned. “Okay, so we fix the coolant system. I guess I’m catching on.”

  “How long will that take?” asked Terri, terrified of what the answer might be.

  The engineers—Al, Mitchell, and Sam—looked at each other. They came together for a moment, discussing the matter quietly. Then Sam decided to answer. “With all three of us, we can get it done within a week. But somebody has to get a less temporary fix on that breach in the ship, as well.”

  A week. That was about as much as their ship’s supplies and energy supply would last before an attempted journey home could end up being incomplete and risky.

  Al leaned against a railing with white knuckles, his brow furrowed, slowly shaking his head, breathing deeply. Terri looked at him with a shared sense of concern.

  Randy was so irate, he was red. “Do we have any clue as to what caused this?”

  Al slowly shrugged, baring his teeth as he said, “It sure doesn’t look like an accident to me. Somebody did that.”

  Everybody was silent, nervously chewing on that for a minute, looking uncomfortably at one another.

  “So…” Mitchell muttered, “we might have a stowaway?”

  Al retorted, “We must. But it’s not a six-inch alien snail, I’ll tell you that much.”

  Sam chimed in, “I don’t know. If something breached through the ship, we would have heard an alarm, and we checked out the one breach we do have almost immediately; there were no stowaways in the medical bay.”

  Some shadowy figure stealing away or killing Shauna and busting their ship’s coolant pipe? It seemed too ridiculous to be real. What other explanations could there be? There had to be something else. And there was no way an animal creature, earthly or alien, was behind it. To do what it did, it had to be intelligent and malevolent.

  If it was even, in fact, a thing. It was possible there was some completely alternate explanation that none of them had considered yet. The uncertainty of it all was like watching an entire sky’s worth of heavy storm clouds creep along the horizon, not knowing whether the wind would blow it towards them or someplace else. Rosalyn stared into her computer screen blankly, fear dulling her senses.

  Whatever was going on aboard the Novara, it was no longer a “borderline” life-threatening situation. They had a very real chance of not making it out alive.

  While the others continued a heated discussion, Rosalyn thought for a moment about that video she had recorded nearly a year ago for her family in case she never made it back home. Mom…Lena…Charly. She had never seriously thought they would watch that thing.

  Was that time fast approaching? She felt her face twitch at the thought of it.

  What am I doing out here? she thought.

  A notification on the screen in f
ront of her shook her out of her thoughts. She pulled up a notice, relayed there from the SNTNL system mainframe, of a message received from FAER at last!

  She waved her hand and shushed her crewmates. “Everyone, listen! FAER has messaged us back. Before we hear it, remember that they haven’t yet received the second message I sent them about Shauna going missing.”

  She cleared her throat and said, “SNTNL, will you read this for us?”

  SNTNL immediately answered with cheerful tone. “Certainly, Captain. Here is FAER’s message: ‘To the acting captain and crew of the Novara: We are, to be frank, dumbstruck by your discovery. The videos you sent us are incredible, marking a historic event in world history. We are not quick to forget the troubles you have experienced, however. Those are regrettable and understandable. There is much to discuss about what has been found, but your safety is of prime importance. With Captain Beele stabilized we have hopes that business will be able to proceed on as usual, but the substance that she has ingested is unknown and thus must be monitored closely. We recommend splitting time between researching the liquid and searching for more valuables in the ruins. In the event that Captain Beele’s state worsens, we recommend instead a full quarantine and returning home at once. If possible, we urge you to bring back some additional samples from 730-X Zacuali—pieces of the ruins, a bit of dust—anything. It will be most useful for study. More footage of the area would be wonderfully valuable for study as well. We have not yet notified anyone outside of the Foundation of your discovery. When and how we do that is a matter to be discussed with utmost carefulness. But again, we believe that discussion should be had after your safety is ensured. We await further word from you, wish Captain Beele a speedy recovery, and thank each of you for your bravery and devotion. Sincerely, FAER.’ ”

  A long moment of uncomfortable silence passed.

  “Wow, hear that, everybody? We can head home!” said Randy with a spin of his comfortable seat. “I call the cryo-pod!”

  The humor didn’t land, which wasn’t much of a surprise given the circumstances. In Randy’s opinion, there was no such thing as a bad time for a joke. To exemplify this he was often quick to tell a story of a time he was at a friend’s funeral and was able to, as he put it, “lighten the mood” for everyone.

  Mitchell winced and scoffed. “What sort of a message was that? That read like a school principal’s mass newsletter to the student body.”

  From where she sat Terri’s eyes seemed to twitch, and she looked over at Rosalyn with a sneer. “ ‘In the event that Captain Beele’s state worsens, we recommend returning home at once.’ ” She cursed and rubbed her forehead. “And you wanted to wait and make sure they would be okay with us leaving this godforsaken place. You’ve gotta be kidding me.”

  Rosalyn turned to her with anger. “What do you want me to do? Guess the future? None of us knew what would happen to Shauna, or what FAER would say to us.”

  Terri only scoffed and shook her head.

  “What are we going to do?” Sam asked with a gaze fixed on Rosalyn. The others followed suit, even Mitchell, who had been preoccupied with glancing out the window with a forlorn look on his face.

  “Well, for starters, no one is taking the cryo-pod,” said Rosalyn. “I know you weren’t serious, Randy, but I do want to be clear: the cryo-pod is a worst-case-scenario option. I would remind you that the cryo-pod is meant for sending back individuals with known terminal illnesses that cannot effectively be treated aboard the ship, so not only would only one of us actually fit in the cell—”

  “Two if you squish,” interjected Randy.

  “—but that one person would travel at an incredibly slow pace, roughly one twenty-sixth of the speed of the Novara. If you traveled to Earth, you likely wouldn’t make it back home until after most of your friends are dead.”

  Al shrugged. “You could travel to TE-551 instead. That’s a lot closer.”

  She frowned. “Yes, but that’s also beyond an asteroid belt. The cryo-pod is not equipped with a sophisticated auto-pilot system, so it’s possible that it might smash into an asteroid on the way there, unless someone was looking for you and found you before that happened. Anyway, the point is, we aren’t using it. Understood?”

  “Gotcha, no cryo-pod,” said Al, resigned.

  The atmosphere was grim. Rosalyn needed to remind everybody that they were capable. “Like Sam said earlier, I’m not a hundred percent convinced we have a stowaway—for instance, it’s possible that both the coolant pipes just had a catastrophic system failure. That said, I don’t want to rule out the possibility that there’s a stowaway of some kind, so everybody needs to be on their guard from now on.

  “And look, I’m not blind to the fact that this is a bad situation. It seems like we’re between a rock and a hard place. But the human imagination is far worse than anything reality can drum up. Nothing is ever as bad as it seems. Even if it takes more than a week to fix the coolant system and the hull breach, there’s a strong chance that we can find materials on the planet to create fuel ourselves before our food supply runs out. We aren’t experts at everything, but we do know how to do that. Of course the ideal is fixing things quickly, however, so we will devote all our efforts to that until after the week is up.

  “Terri and Randy, do you feel confident working on fixing the hull of the ship?”

  They glanced at each other before Randy responded, “Not terribly, no.”

  Rosalyn looked at her three engineers. “Alright, well…can one of you guys teach us to fix the hull?”

  Al thought for a moment, uncertain. “Possibly.”

  Terri beamed, an idea crossing her mind. “W-wait, wait—what if we just seal off the medical bay and don’t go in during the return journey? I mean, most of my supplies are totally busted anyway, so there’s no point in going in there.”

  Some of the crewmates perked up. Maybe that would work.

  “I wouldn’t prefer that,” said Rosalyn. “It’s worth considering, but I think until we have that coolant pipe fixed up, let’s just focus on having the wall repaired.”

  Terri’s somewhat-typical blank, unimpressed expression returned to her face.

  Rosalyn asked, “Does all of that sound good to everybody?”

  Everyone nodded in some level of agreement, except for Terri.

  “Great. I don’t know about anybody else, but I’m going to go take a shower and eat some food.”

  “Hold on,” said Sam. “What’s the status of SNTNL’s tests on that black liquid?”

  “I have little to report,” SNTNL replied. “It doesn’t match any known substance in our galaxy. It has strange properties, some uncommon in any other liquid or substance we know of, namely it having what can be assumed to be a second set of unique DNA merged with it. …To say anything more would be mere speculation.”

  Rosalyn looked at the analysis data SNTNL had brought up on her screen. As it had said, the data brought up far more questions than it answered. Staring at the three-dimensional mock-up of the substance’s molecular structure awoke some formless fear within her, but she quelled it quickly. “Well, there you go, Sam. I’ll spend some time looking at this myself and let you know if I find anything.”

  He nodded.

  She continued, “That’s all I have to say to everyone. Once we’re all ready, let’s have our engineers start working on the coolant pipe while we on the Bridge do some more radar examinations of the ruins.”

  Terri crossed her arms and raised her eyebrows. “Wait, you’re following that order? The message said that if Shauna’s condition worsens, we have their permission to abandon the mission.”

  Rosalyn looked back at her with expression neutral. “I recognize that. I just think that considering we’re stuck here for a bit, we might as well get a bit more data for FAER. If you disagree, I’d recommend talking to me in private. For now, let’s break.”

  Slowly everyone got up and started walking back to their rooms, but Mitchell stopped them all halfway to the door.


  “Guys! Hey, uh, I’m sorry to bring this up, what with everything else going on, but Brady is missing. Last we saw of him was when Terri and I were searching in the loading deck, but he’s been hiding from us or something. If anyone spots him, just let me know, okay? Thanks.”

  Sam tapped Mitchell’s arm and grinned softly. “We’ll find him, buddy. Maybe even alive.”

  Mitchell guffawed and shook his head. “You, my friend, are the master of anti-comedy.”

  Randy laughed, drawing their attention.

  “Well, okay: runner-up master,” amended Mitchell.

  Randy’s laugh turned to a glare.

  Each of them headed for the showers, a euphoric and much-needed opportunity to burn off some steam. Rosalyn let her concerns melt away with the flow of warm water, stroking her hair. As per usual, Terri went first and finished her shower quickly. From within her shower stall, Rosalyn could hear Terri stepping out of her stall and walking past Rosalyn’s.

  “Lucky, lucky, aren’t you, Roz?” Terri said.

  “…What?” she responded over the sound of water rushing onto her body.

  “You finally got that promotion you were looking for.”

  Rosalyn felt her heart drop, and her body was frozen for a moment.

  Terri smirked and stepped over to the mirror to casually do her make-up. She heard the water go off in Rosalyn’s shower. Not a second later, the curtain was shoved aside and wet, dripping Rosalyn was walking towards Terri, towel hastily wrapping around her torso.

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean, Doctor Jones?”

  She chuckled, towels on her hair and around her torso. “I’m sorry. Maybe you’re still not advancing quickly enough for your liking?”

  Rosalyn’s face was stern, her energy boiling, but in check. “Not one of us isn’t having a tough time with everything that’s going on. But what I don’t need, on top of all my other problems, is your petty attitude.”

  Terri narrowed her eyes. “What problems are those? I can’t tell; are you talking about keeping everyone alive, or making sure FAER gets the biggest bang for its buck? ’Cause I know one of those things is going a lot better than the other.”