The Hyperspace Trap

by Christopher Nuttall

“Understood, sir,” Avis said.

  Slater glanced at Matt. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get a move on.”

  The flashes at the corner of his eye grew stronger as they made their way down to the command deck. Matt glanced from side to side, silently noting the damage. The ship was odd. Some parts appeared to be intact, frozen in time; others appeared to be damaged, although there was no clear cause. But then Supreme had been badly damaged when she’d been yanked into the hyperspace distortion. Gladys might have been designed for survey work, but Supreme might have better protections.

  “The hatch is open,” Slater said. The radio produced a stream of static. He had to repeat the message twice before Avis replied. “We’re going in.”

  Matt tensed as they moved into the bridge, which was surprisingly intact compared to Supreme’s. But bodies were drifting everywhere. One body, a woman, he thought, was strapped into the command chair; others were tied down or drifting through the air. He shone his flashlight around, feeling his stomach heave at the sight before him. The flickering grew stronger once again. It was hard to escape the sense that Gladys was a haunted ship.

  “The bridge is completely powered down,” Slater reported. “I’m checking for a logbook now.”

  “Check under the command chair, sir,” Avis advised. “Some of the early ships required a paper copy as well as datachips.”

  Slater nodded. “Evans, check the nearby compartments,” he ordered. “I’ll look here.”

  Matt pulled himself towards the nearest hatch, which looked as though it had been cut open. The edges were scorched and warped by immense heat. Outside, a handful of corpses drifted in uneasy peace. One held a cutting laser that looked to have come from the past. Matt’s lips twitched, despite the situation. It had come from the past. Modern-day cutters were far more efficient.

  “Five more dead bodies,” he reported. He peered through another hatch into a small cabin. It was too close to the bridge to belong to anyone but the captain, yet . . . it looked tiny. Captains were normally given big cabins, weren’t they? But then, Gladys was an exploration ship with limited space for her crew. “Sir, there’s a handful of books on the desk.”

  “Bag them up,” Slater ordered. “And hurry.”

  Matt made his way into the cabin, which looked as though someone had ransacked it, tossing pieces of clothing and the captain’s personal effects in all directions. They hadn’t touched the books, somewhat to his surprise. Three looked to be historical fiction; the fourth was a logbook, and the fifth, a private journal. He opened the logbook and glanced at the text. HMMS GLADYS, LAUNCHED 2119. The last entry in the logbook was dated 2120, less than a year after Gladys had departed Earth. He shivered. He’d been told, time and time again, that the people who’d opened up the spacelanes were heroes. And yet, they’d been trapped . . .

  He put the books in his pouch, then scooped up a number of primitive datachips. There was no way to know what was on them without checking, but he thought it was worth taking them too. Searching the entire ship would take time, time he didn’t think they had. He took one last look around the cabin, picking up a picture of a woman in an unfamiliar uniform before leaving. The bridge looked deserted . . .

  . . . and then Slater popped up from one of the consoles.

  “I’ve removed the record chips,” he said. “We might not be able to read them, but we can try.”

  “Yes, sir,” Matt said. Just for a second, he’d thought that Slater had vanished. Things were gleaming at the corner of his eye. “How do you want to proceed?”

  Slater’s voice was tired, defeated. “We take the logbook and the chips back to the ship and investigate them,” he said. “And then . . . we’ll have to see what we can do next.”

  “Yes, sir,” Matt said. “Should we take one of the cadavers back for the doctor?”

  “If she has time to take a look at it,” Slater said. “Put it in a bag before you take it out of the ship.”

  Matt nodded. He’d hastily brushed up on the alien contact protocols, although none of the writers had envisaged anything like the graveyard. Most of them had assumed an encounter between two starships—one human, one alien—all alone in the dark. Others had assumed the discovery of a primitive alien world. That, at least, had been simple. Contact was strictly forbidden on pain of death. Meeting an alien race at an equal or superior level of tech, on the other hand . . .

  They were worried about alien biological matter getting loose, he recalled. Who knows what might have happened to the drifting bodies?

  He bagged up the nearest corpse, then dragged it back to the airlock. The remainder of the team were waiting outside, exchanging nervous signals. Slater spoke briefly to them, then led them away from Gladys. Matt took one last look at the starship before following Slater. How could an entire starship go missing, even from an earlier era, and leave no trace behind? But, then, it had been the dawn of a new age of exploration. Humanity was leaving its native star system and striding out into the galaxy. No one had been willing to count the cost.

  The radio crackled time and time again. Matt listened to the voices, but they were never clear, like hearing two people talking behind a wall, their voices muffled. Avis spoke incessantly about what they might have seen on Gladys, but Matt tuned her out. The old vessel had been creepy as hell. There was no way he wanted to go back there.

  We might have to go back, he thought. Or inspect one of the alien ships.

  “We’ll be going in through the lower hatch,” Slater said. “They’ll have set up the decontamination facility by now.”

  “Fuck,” Avis said. “Sir, must we—”

  “Yes,” Slater said. “We don’t have a choice.”

  Matt kept his thoughts to himself as they reached Supreme. The cruise liner looked as though she’d been in a battle, her hull scorched and pitted by enemy fire. And yet there was something curiously intelligent about the damage. Sensor blisters and weapons mounts had been disabled or destroyed, but the giant windows had been left completely untouched. He saw no trace of air venting from the ship’s hull. Matt wondered if something had wanted to render them helpless yet leave the crew and passengers alive.

  He turned to look at the drifting alien ships. Was there some force out there, waiting for them?

  “The damage is odd,” he said quietly. “Whatever did this was intelligent.”

  “I’ll thank you to keep that speculation to yourself,” Slater said. “We don’t want a panic.”

  Matt said nothing as they passed through the hatch and into the airlock, then moved the bags into the next compartment. Hopefully there wouldn’t be any danger. He couldn’t believe that anything, even a tiny bacterium, could have survived in the vacuum. But if the sensors were unreliable, who knew what might slip onto Supreme?

  A light danced at the corner of his eye. He shivered.

  “Strip down,” Slater ordered as they stepped into the second compartment. “Once you’re naked, move forward and into the shower.”

  Avis removed her suit and walked forward. Matt told himself, firmly, to keep his eyes closed when he stepped into the shower. He’d never been through a chemical decontamination—he’d never needed one—but he knew the procedure. It was not going to be pleasant.

  Avis yelped as warm liquid cascaded onto her. Matt kept his eyes closed as he inched forward into the shower. The chemical was hot and smelly, hot enough to be thoroughly uncomfortable. His head itched as he kept moving forward, reminding him that the chemical might cost him his hair. He hoped Angela didn’t care that much for his looks. He grunted in shock as cold water rushed over him, followed by a gust of warm air.

  “Come forward,” a voice ordered. “You appear to be clean.”

  “Thank you,” Matt managed. “Is it safe to open my eyes?”

  “Yes,” the voice said.

  Matt opened his eyes. He stood in a small quarantine chamber, watched by two nurses. Avis was on the far side of the chamber, climbing into a pair of overalls. Matt took a set f
or himself and donned the garment, hastily.

  “You’ll be in here for an hour,” one of the nurses said. “If we don’t find any reason to be worried, we’ll let you go.”

  “And if we mutate into slime-eating monsters from some unpronounceable world?” Avis asked.

  “We’ll be sure to feed you lots of slime,” the nurse said.

  “Oh,” Matt said. “Is it that dangerous?”

  The nurse snorted. “It’s unlikely that you could have picked up anything dangerous,” she said. “But if we’re wrong . . .”

  “As if things weren’t bad enough already,” Matt agreed. The nurses had been assigned to watch them. That, if nothing else, was a clear warning of just how seriously the captain was taking the situation. “We’ll wait here and pray.”

  “A very good idea,” the nurse said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  “No biological hazards, then?”

  “Not as far as the doc can tell,” Jeanette said firmly. She sounded better after a few hours of sleep. “Joan was careful to point out that half her scanners were on the blink. The autopsy may tell us more, sir, but I wouldn’t count on it.”

  Paul nodded. If they saw home again, there was a good chance he’d be put in front of a court-martial board or a formal inquest for gross negligence. The regulations regarding alien biological matter were strict, all the more so for never having been tested. Gladys wasn’t an alien ship, admittedly, but who knew what the drifting hulk might have picked up over the years? The biological scanners and nanotech repair drones were offline. It was impossible to be sure.

  Which is a problem, he thought. We can’t be sure there isn’t a threat.

  He sat down at his desk and opened the logbook. The object felt odd to his touch, as if it was out of place in his office. The book felt as if it belonged to another time and place, which it did, in a sense. Dust fell as he turned the pages, slowly parsing out the handwritten words. It was sheer luck that the UN Survey Regulations had called for a physical logbook as well as computer records.

  “Keep an eye on the passengers,” he ordered. “I’ll read the logbook myself.”

  “Aye, sir,” Jeanette said.

  She withdrew silently. Paul rubbed his forehead—a few hours of sleep hadn’t made him feel much better—and then read the first entry. HMMS Gladys had been launched from the Peter Hamilton Shipyard back in 2119. The handwriting changed twice before settling down into a distinctive hand: Captain Rebecca Hall, Royal Space Navy. Paul ground his teeth in frustration, wishing he could access the historical datacores. There was probably a whole series of books and documentaries about Gladys and the other survey ships that had gone out and never returned, but they were beyond his reach.

  We’ll just have to make do with what we have, he thought as he skimmed through the crumbly pages. There’s no way to access the datacores without wasting power.

  He allowed himself a flicker of admiration for the long-dead captain. Captain Hall had had an eye for detail, apparently, even though she’d written in a chatty manner that felt oddly irreverent to Paul’s eyes. She’d outlined everything from an admiral’s visit to her ship’s first official transit into hyperspace. Gladys had been a good ship. Captain Hall had clearly been proud of her. She’d located two life-bearing worlds before setting off to chart out an entirely new region of hyperspace. And then . . .

  We detected a hyperspace storm on long-range sensors and attempted to evade contact as much as possible. Unfortunately, the storm appeared to be expanding rapidly, perhaps coming after us. When it caught us, the shock knocked the entire crew out; when we recovered, we found ourselves trapped in a strange region of space. Many of our systems are now nonfunctional. Our sensors can tell us nothing about local space. The green light is everywhere. Anything could be hiding in the light.

  Paul sucked in his breath as he read the next set of entries. Gladys hadn’t been entirely a military ship, but most of her crew were military officers. They hadn’t panicked. Instead, they’d run a series of experiments to determine just where they were and to establish the properties of this region of space. Captain Hall had seemed torn between believing they were in an uncharted region of hyperspace and a whole other realm. Paul found that discouraging. Captain Hall and her crew had been far more imaginative when it came to carrying out experiments.

  Our engineers believe that we cannot generate enough power to open a vortex by conventional means. We have devised a scheme to use the nukes to generate the power, although this runs the risk of completely destroying either the vortex generator or the entire ship. The magnetic bottles cannot be relied upon to contain the blast long enough to throw us back into normal space. Too many of our remaining systems are already failing.

  “Shit,” Paul muttered. He’d known that the saga of HMMS Gladys didn’t have a happy ending, but Captain Hall sounded so hopeful. “They didn’t find a way out in time.”

  He closed his eyes for a long moment, then forced himself to read on. The systems failures had continued, each one imperiling the ship still further. Captain Hall ordered her crew into spacesuits, falling back on the most primitive technology at her disposal to keep them alive for a few days longer. It hadn’t been enough. Random failures kept mounting up, injuring or killing crewmen. The situation was beyond their comprehension.

  Midshipman Rollins went insane today, screaming about voices in his ears. He had to be dragged off Lieutenant Yeller by Midshipman Perkin and Midshipwoman Henri. I was forced to order him confined in a vacant cabin. Midshipwoman Yates and seven other crew told me, afterwards, that they too have been hearing voices. We have attempted to record these voices, but they have defied our remaining systems.

  Paul sucked in his breath. A couple of crewmen had reported hearing voices on Supreme . . .

  Four more fights broke out today, seemingly about nothing. I ordered senior officers to break up the scuffles, but two of them actually joined in. The fighting seemed to be nothing more than pointless violence. There was no attempt to take the bridge, Engineering, or any other vital area. By the time the conflict ended, seven crewmen were dead, and five more were seriously wounded . . .

  . . . I heard the voices myself shortly afterwards. No matter what I did, I couldn’t make out the words. Other crewmen have reported seeing ghosts, or worse. Our sleep is constantly disturbed by hellish nightmares. I have ordered the doctor to pass out sedatives to anyone who asks, but it is a limited solution. Two crewmen attacked others while seemingly sleepwalking. They have both been confined to quarters . . .

  . . . Rollins died today. His last words were about eyes watching him.

  Paul trembled. How many Supreme crewmen had reported feeling as though they were being watched?

  Commander Hernandez attempted to kill me this afternoon, apparently as a diversion. I fought him off, somehow, and knocked him out. But when I reached the bridge, I discovered that a team of crewmen had gone rogue and attacked the nuke assembly, blowing the whole thing into space. I started to organize a recovery team, but the nukes detonated. The blasts seemed oddly dimmed, as if something was draining the power. It didn’t matter. We were trapped. The voices are laughing at us . . .

  . . . I have lost control of all decks now, save for the command bridge. Half the ship appears to be vented, as far as I can tell. The rest appears to be under mutineer control. I have nine men left under my command, all twitchy as hell. They flinch at shadows, at things lurking in the darkness. Emergency power is failing. I see dead people.

  The next few lines were completely illegible. Paul tried to figure them out, then gave it up as impossible. Captain Hall had clearly been on the verge of madness, if she hadn’t been mad already. She’d lost control of her ship and her crew. The final entry was stark and utterly hopeless.

  I have put the ship’s cores into stasis mode, in hopes that they will one day be recovered. But the voices tell me that we will never be seen again. I hear them laughing, laughing, laughing . . . I cannot escape. None of us can esc
ape. Our doom is upon us. We are in hell. Abandon all hope, all ye who enter here.

  Paul started. “Shit.”

  He forced himself to reread the final set of entries. Gladys had degraded rapidly, losing all power within seventeen days. Or so he thought. Captain Hall had been a little sloppy about noting the precise dates and times of her final entries. But Paul found it hard to blame her in her final hours. She’d devised a plan to get her ship and crew out of the nightmare only to see it lost to mutiny and madness. Paul doubted he’d have done much better if he’d been in her place.

  I am in her place, he thought numbly.

  He forced himself to think, clearly. Something was missing from the logbook, something important. It took him several minutes to place it. Captain Hall hadn’t mentioned any alien ships. It was inconceivable that she wouldn’t have mentioned them if she’d seen the alien craft. And that meant . . . either her sensors had been too badly battered to detect the ships or Gladys had been the first vessel to enter the lobster pot. He wasn’t sure which one he preferred.

  “They had a plan,” he said aloud. “But would it have worked?”

  He keyed his wristcom. “Commander Haverford, Chief Slater, Mr. Roeder, please report to me at once.”

  “Aye, Captain,” Jeanette said. “I’m on my way.”

  Paul reread the logbook once again. There was no hope in it, nothing to suggest that Supreme had any better chance to escape. And yet there was a warning. His crew and passengers were already hearing voices. Would they start going insane?

  And if they do, he thought dourly, what can we do about it?

  “There’s little hope in the logbook,” he said once his subordinates were assembled. “But Captain Hall did have a plan to escape.”

  Roeder took the logbook and read through the relevant sections. “Their engineers had balls, sir,” he said. “I wouldn’t care to rig up a bomb-pumped system like this if you paid me.”

  Jeanette lifted her eyebrows. “It’s that dangerous?”

  “Yes,” Roeder said. “If they lost control, if the magnetic bottle failed, the blast would severely damage a modern warship. There was actually a concept for using bomb-pumped lasers in warships that never got off the ground simply because of the risks. A small failure could lead to a destroyed vessel. Doing this . . .” He shook his head as he passed her the logbook. “They must have been desperate.”