by R. T. Kaelin
“Any survivors on the scope?”
“Unknown. If there are, there won’t be for long if we don’t do something about it fast.”
“This could be a nice salvage,” Arianna said, regaining her business sense.
“Don’t get too excited,” Bolt scolded her. “There could be anything over there.”
He engaged the tractor beam and stopped the spin of the asteroid. Then, he worked hard to delicately bring the ship closer, relying both on the tractor beam and the most modest bursts of the sub-light thrusters. Using the pair in concert, he put the rear hatch in line with the airlock of the miners’ work dome.
“We have a seal,” Bolt called out, his skin returning to a more normal color after the extreme concentration he mustered to line the ships up without damaging anything.
“Is the leak affecting the atmo on their side.”
“Unknown.”
“Is there anything you can tell me? How am I supposed make decisions with such terrible information?”
“Arianna.” Bolt growled, his skin flashed toward a menacing and annoyed red.
“Fine, fine, I get the picture. Let’s suit up and see what there is to see.”
“Aye, aye, captain.”
Soon, the intrepid ne’er-do-wells were enclosed in their vacuum-tight suits and helmets. The suits were a leathery red to match Arianna’s sense of fashion. More than that, though, it served as a psychological advantage. Nothing looked more menacing than a Dracadian decked in red, their most aggressive color, with a laser pistol on the hip. Once they’d completed all the required integrity checks on their suits, the pair of them stood silently at the airlock doors.
Arianna pressed a button, beginning the long, slow process of opening the Ariannica’s airlock. It hissed and whirred as the hexagonal doors slowly separated at the middle, parting the way for their exit. The hatch on the other side, on the work dome, was open already. The shift in air pressure tugged on Arianna and Bolt. Though the tiny hole leaking the atmosphere from the miner’s work dome was clearly affecting the air in the entire ship, Arianna was grateful it wasn’t affecting things enough to vent the whole air supply.
“Must be smaller than a pinhole,” Bolt speculated, “I’m surprised they still have air.”
“These mining rigs have pretty powerful rebreather stations. They could just churn trapped oxygen out of the rock long enough to keep pace with the hole for a while.”
“And when they run out of rock?”
Arianna frowned, ignoring the question. “Let’s see if there’s anyone around.”
Bolt raised his light stick, casting a focused spot of bright white light into the damaged work dome. Arianna followed suit. They both kept their free hands hovered over their holstered laser pistols, ready for trouble at a moment’s notice.
“After you,” she told the Dracadian. Bolt took his cue and stepped into the darkness, toward whatever might lay beyond.
The work dome was simple inside, the design a simple design a utilitarian style without a bit of wasted space. Tools suitable for mining were secured to every surface. Any area not filled with tools was filled with pipes, electronic equipment, sensors, and any number of other technological gadgetry. Cabinets and lockers occupied every other space; chock full of every other sort of supply one would need for an operation such as this, both for the routine and during an emergency.
“It’s awfully quiet,” Arianna said, her voice modulated through the helmet and transmitted to Bolt’s personal earpiece.
“You always say that.”
“I always mean it,” she said, nodding at the walls. “And besides, look at all the stuff they have in here. We could make quite a tidy pile of credit salvaging all these prospecting tools and tech. The payload here would be impressive.”
“Why don’t we see if anyone’s alive before we get too excited about the salvage rights.”
“You are such a spoiler.”
“No. I’m a realist. That’s why you pay me. Not enough, I might add.”
“Bring it up in your next review.”
They moved through the deserted hallways, lighting their own path, wondering aloud to each other why the lights might be off.
“There’s damage to the lighting circuits,” Bolt guessed.
“Or the power’s out.”
“I’d say it’s the modulator.”
“You always think it’s the modulator.”
“It usually is.”
Their slow and steady search brought them to the hallway that would have ordinarily led to the mother-ship. An emergency door blocked their way, sealing them inside the dome.
Arianna wondered if it had done its job.
“Do you hear that?” Bolt asked her.
“You hear that hiss, too?”
“Aye. It’s louder here.” Bolt said and pointed to the wall. “I think the leak is around here somewhere.”
“Can we patch it?”
“If I can find it.”
“Isn’t that what your fancy technology is for?”
Bolt groaned. “Well, let’s keep moving. I can take care of it when we find the survivors.”
“If we find survivors,” Arianna corrected him.
The Dracadian bruiser groaned once more and they continued on their way. They wandered through the hallways until they came to the junction they believed would take them to the mine.
Arianna kept a close eye on her temperature gauge. Had they had been outside of their suits, they would have felt the air grow colder as they got closer to the asteroid surface that made up the increasingly deep floor of the massive work dome. The hallway led to a lift heading down.
“Shall we?” Bolt asked her.
“Go down?”
“I think if they’re anywhere, it’s down. We’ve explored everywhere else.”
“Stop being so logical.”
“Give me a raise.”
“Get in the lift.”
As they descended toward the surface of the asteroid shielded by the dome, Bolt wondered aloud. “You know, I would have expected to see at least a corpse or two by now.
“There might not have even been anyone here when the event happened. We could be worrying about nothing whatsoever.”
“We still have to check.”
“Ever the hero. Remind me again why I hired you?”
“No.”
The lift shuddered to a stop and the doors to the elevator platform opened slowly, parting from the center. The metal work grate slipped up, disappearing into the elevator shaft.
Both Bolt and Arianna brought their lights up to bear beyond the door, but found the work lights in that section of the dome working properly. The bright lights weren’t the oddest thing they found, though.
It was the piercing gaze of a dozen miners in pressure suits, huddled together, turning their collective focus on the new arrivals.
Arianna whispered into her modulator for Bolt’s ears only, “Well, there goes our salvage.”
Ignoring her, Bolt took a step out of the elevator, “What can we do to help?”
“Boy! Are we glad to see somebody all the way out here,” one of the miners exclaimed, approaching them and offering hands to shake.
“We were pretty sure we were going to die down here,” another said, relieved.
There were ten in all, each of them with families drifting somewhere out there in the aether of the asteroid field.
The story they told was a tragic one. Arianna cringed at every detail, horrified, though secretly relieved that it was a fate that had befallen someone else and not her. But every minute they spent dallying in the asteroids, she knew it was a minute sooner to the wrath of Trucker and his rage. All the warm feelings that came with helping someone in need were matched equally with the anxiety of the imagined reactions of a homicidal employer.
Contact with the ship full of families and coworkers, The Titanium Dream VII, had been cut off at the moment of impact. There was no visual of the ship that they could find o
n the sensors and as far as they knew, the explosion took every one of their loved ones with it. By the end of their explanations, more than one of them was crying.
Arianna tried putting herself in their spacesuits and wondered how she’d feel if she lived their sort of life. Settling down was something she never spent much time considering, it simply wasn’t in the cards for the lifestyle she led. And even if it was something she wanted to do, choices from her past made that impossible. The closest being she was connected to was Bolt, and the thought of losing him was something she’d be dismayed about, it was a likely scenario in any partnership. No matter how long they had lasted and no matter how strong the bonds were, the dissolution of a partnership was nothing more than routine business. She frowned, realizing that she had no meaningful personal connections, only a life of making it by the skin of her teeth.
Imagining a family on the other end of the unknown was incredibly difficult for her.
Lost in that thought, she almost didn’t hear what Bolt told the wayward miners. “We’ll help you find your families.”
“What did you say?” she blurted.
“We’ll help them get home. It’s the least we can do.” Then, turning to the men they’d found, Bolt assured them. “Let’s get you guys to our ship and get your spacesuits off. They must be awful by now.”
“Bolt, could I speak with you for a moment?” Arianna pulled the Dracadian by the arm, ten feet away and around a corner and out of earshot of what she didn’t want to become the new passengers.
“What?”
“What are you doing? We can’t take these guys on. The Ariannica isn’t big enough as it is for the two of us, what makes you think bringing ten more on is going to be a good idea? And we need to get this cargo to Trucker, yesterday. He’s going to kill us. And we don’t even know if their ship is out there. We could spend weeks looking for it, the whole time bounty hunters will be combing this sector for our sorry hides.”
“We don’t have a choice.”
“Of course we have a choice. We could put them all in the airlock and get rid of the whole lot of them and get out of here but quick.”
“You’re more than welcome to try it.” Bolt turned, leaving Arianna with her indignation.
She wondered what it was that she’d ever done to have such an insubordinate first mate and exactly at what point it was he stopped treating her like the captain. Maddening as it was to her, she knew Bolt had come to the morally correct answer, even if it wasn’t the one she wanted to hear. He was every bit her conscience as he was her first mate.
Catching back up to Bolt, Arianna put on a bright, but reluctant, smile for the miners who were all making their way for The Ariannica.
“We’re grateful for your help, Captain. It’s mighty gracious of you.”
“It’s the least we can do to help your find your ship,” Bolt said, cutting Arianna off before she could say a word. “You’d do the same for us.”
Arianna took in a sharp breath and turned on her heels, taking heavy boot steps ahead of the group so she could get to the ship first and find solitude before Bolt and the miners boarded.
* *** *
The families and crew of The Titanium Dream VII felt hopeless. Every system on the ship that could help them survive the calamity or find their way back to the asteroid and their missing loved ones was damaged, malfunctioning, or flat-out destroyed. They had no sensors, they had no thrusters, they barely had a distress transponder, and the power to that was fading quickly.
The only thing they did have going in their favor was the food and ration supply. Their resequencers and recyclers and hydroponic gardens would keep them from starving to death, which doomed them to a death sentence of a different kind.
Since they could live indefinitely in space, they certainly would. And they’d die of old age, never again knowing the joys of planet-side leave, natural air, and standard gravity.
All they would know was the listless rotation of a ship lost on the edge of known space.
Terror set in when they began to think of their loved ones and co-workers in the work dome. If they’d survived the event, wouldn’t be so lucky.
Tears came from many.
To the children, grim explanations were made full of false hope.
The adults responded in the only way one could in the face of such a tragedy. They lifted up their heads, put on brave faces, and searched for any solution to their problems. They worked diligently on every possible lead they could find that could potentially save their souls.
The maintenance droids were dispatched to the most critical areas. The more technically minded men, the older engineers and the younger generation of miners, did what they could to fiddle with the communications arrays. The computer bank with all the pertinent data, repair manuals, and schematics had gone offline, giving them nowhere to start. They worked hard from memory, knowing that in many cases, all they were doing was simply keeping busy.
Some posited that the most terrible part of their plight was that it was very likely that no one would ever know. They would have to live the rest of their lives as a footnote in some random space log and the galaxy would never know for sure what happened to them.
One mother had a vision of the future, wondering what her children would think after they’d grown up on their death ark, why their family had ever even signed up for the mission. Would the children couple up, she wondered, and create a third generation lost to the asteroid field on the rim? Or would they be resentful and refuse to bring another generation into their miserable doom? Sure, it all sounded dramatic, but when facing such a possibility, no line of future-thought could be too grim.
Another man, an engineer, knew that he’d die cooped up on the ship if he didn’t do everything he could to right their course and stop their slow spin through the asteroid field. He knew, quite rightly, that the longer they remained in the floating rock debris, the more likely a crushing blow would be dealt them.
His purpose was singular and he was going to take apart every system on the ship and put it back together again until they all worked and they could fly home.
Every inhabitant of the Titanium Dream had these notions of their own, hoping that their nightmare would ease back and the odds would once more be in their favor. The chances were astronomical, but that’s what they would cling to: their astronomical dreams that help could come.
Because sometimes, all people needed was just a little bit of help.
* *** *
“I’ve got something,” Bolt called out from the helm, his skin turning a helpful and empathic, mottled blue-green. “It’s weak, but it’s something!”
“Put it on visual,” Arianna ordered. There was an annoyed chill to her voice.
Bolt complied with her icy command and put the image on the monitor above them. It showed nothing more than a distant look at asteroids and the Dracadian’s skin rippled with the colors of frustration.
“I thought you said you had something,” Arianna said.
They could hear feet shuffling on the metal-plated floors behind them. “What was that?”
“What was what?”
“We heard an alarm, Captain, sounded like proximity. We thought you might have found our ship.” A warble of lost hope and desperation lilted through his voice.
“When we find something, you’ll be the first to know.”
“I just thought—”
The Dracadian cut them all off. “Get over here and look at this, I think we do have something.”
The miner bounded into the room with a renewed energy, moving right past Arianna and straining his eyes to see what the monitor might show.
Bolt put his finger on a gray block of debris that blended in the background almost at the color of space behind it. “That. That right there, I think that’s what’s putting off the signal.”
“Can you enhance that image at all?” Arianna asked him, hoping it was the remains of the ship they’d been searching for. Hopefully, they would be a
ble to jettison the miners quickly and get back to their business before drawing Trucker’s ire.
“I’ll try some different filters and wavelengths.”
Fiddling with a variety of knobs and switches, forcing the monitor to cycle through a variety of color spectrums until the miner who had stepped in called him to stop. “Right there. No,” he said, “back up one.”
Arianna tried hard to keep from rolling her eyes, and instead took a step toward the monitor. There was something on the screen, rolling along with the asteroids. “What’s that?”
The miner, whose name strip read Lancet, put his finger up to the anomalous gray blob on the monitor. “That’s a piece of the…”
Lancet lost the words in mid-sentence. His chin quivered and the edges of his eyes turned red, misted over with moisture. If she wasn’t so worried about Trucker filleting her alive with a blade, she would have almost felt sorry for the poor sod and his plight. But she couldn’t help laying it on thick: “Piece of the what?”
“The…the…”
“Spit it out.” Arianna ignored Bolt’s dirty look and warming skin tones.
A single tear rolled down Lancet’s cheek as he finally brought himself to explain further. “The ship. Our ship.”
“That’s all that’s left, do you think?”
Lancet shrugged, clearly not wanting to believe the possibilities. “It looks like it’s just a piece of the tube. There’s no reason to believe…”
“What? That they’ve all been blown to smithereens?”
Bolt stepped in between Arianna and Lancet, and asked, “Captain, might I have a word with you?”
“By all means.”
They stepped out of the crammed cockpit, through the hallway, and into the Captain’s bunk. It was small, as one would expect on a smuggling ship as small as The Ariannica. It had one small bed, a refresher station, and a cabinet for personal effects. Arianna hadn’t personalized it in any meaningful way, save the spray-painted logo she’d made for the ship on the wall.
Bolt quite carefully slid the door closed behind them.
“What?” She asked innocently.
“What? That guys family is probably dead, you’re provoking him, and ‘what?’ is all you can say?”