by Graeme Hurry
Lech acknowledged the instructions. He opened his mouth to get the crew into the airlock, but before he could speak, Neeru shoved against him hard with her back, depressed the hatch control with her boot, and lunged into the airlock.
‘Neeru!’ He kicked off the hatch behind him to get into the airlock before she could shut him out, but something stopped him mid-flight.
Christina’s hand.
‘Damn it, Chris!’ The inner hatch closed and the light indicated the pressure sequence had started. Neeru was exiting the rig.
‘Let her go,’ Christina said. ‘No point.’
‘She’s going to get her samples,’ David said to himself. His voice was soft, and in it Lech could hear his approval.
‘Chris, you just lost your job,’ Lech said. ‘Neeru,’ he called over the comm, ‘you’re doing this, it’s you alone. You’d better hurry.’
‘I know,’ she came back.
Lech watched the clock on his heads-up and refused to look at his crew. Four minutes went by before Neeru spoke again.
‘I’m at the site, climbing in. Two minutes and I’ll get what I need.’
‘Be fast,’ David said.
A second later she gasped and choked into the comm, as though she’d inhaled something toxic. ‘Oh god,’ she whispered. ‘Oh god. They’re moving.’
A scream of high-pitched static, and silence.
Lech’s entire body seized. He wanted to throw up.
‘Neeru,’ David screamed into his comm. Silence. Again he called her name. Silence.
He pressed the inner hatch button.
‘David, what are you doing?’ Lech yelled. The hatch opened and David climbed in.
‘What you should be doing,’ Christina said. She pushed herself into the chamber with David.
‘You two are not going to make it. Wait for Walker.’
David shook his head and closed the inner hatch. Lech looked away as the pressure sequence started.
For a minute he was unsure what to do, and he looked around the room dumbly, as though a solution might jump out of the walls. Then he called back to the Interceptor. ‘Walker, are you to us yet?’
‘Touching down.’
‘My crew is at the mining site. I think they’re being attacked.’
A pause. ‘Stay where you are. We’re on our way to them.’
Lech unlocked himself from the MMU and twisted away from it, then opened the prep chamber hatch and began to push down the corridor to the shaft that lead to the flight deck.
‘David, Chris, are you still with me?’
‘We’re almost there,’ David said.
‘Do you see her?’
‘No.’
‘Walker and his guys are on their way, just sit —’
‘Hold on,’ David interrupted. ‘I see —’
A scream of high-pitched static.
Lech lost his grip on the bulkhead he was using to aim his flight through the shaft and collided with the wall. He could feel himself starting to sob, and when he could finally inhale, he called to David and Christina three times, so loud it made his throat raw, but the comm only gave him silence.
He pushed on to the deck. At the flight console, he called up the three video feeds on the display, but nothing came through. The monitor showed that each signal had been lost, as well as the signal from the equipment at the drill site. He contacted the Interceptor.
‘Walker, are you there.’
Silence.
‘Walker?’
He looked out the front window. The Interceptor had indeed positioned itself on the asteroid, close to the looming structure of the bulk processor. Lech could see no figures anywhere.
He knew that the Interceptor’s crew would not have had time to cover the full distance to the mining site. If Walker and his men had encountered any… resistance, he thought, they would have found it on the way.
Whatever it was had left the mining site and was making its way to the rig.
Lech called out on all channels, ‘Karolczak of the Arrigato. Can anyone hear me?’ He waited. ‘Is anyone there?’
Silence.
He took a deep breath and started the ignition sequence.
* * *
In the holding cell, the investigator looked down at her pad.
‘From here I assume the forensic description matches your version of events?’
‘I haven’t read it.’
She cleared her throat. ‘As I understand it, the Arrigato began an ascent from Castalia with the umbilicus still engaged?’
‘It had been damaged. I would not have been able to disengage it myself.’
‘You made the decision to debark because you were worried the assailants you describe intended to board or damage the Arrigato?’
Lech swallowed. ‘Yes. I have told them I am willing to take a lie detector test. ‘
She nodded. ‘That’s fine. And you were aware that the linkages at either end of the umbilicus are made with different tensile strengths?’
She looked up at him for an answer. From the tone of her voice, she might have been talking about roof shingles. ‘Yes,’ Lech answered. ‘The processor side is deliberately handicapped so that in the event the umbilicus fails to disengage, it doesn’t rip out the side of the hull.’
She nodded again. ‘The report claims that a steel o-ring on the processor-side juncture scraped against piping and caused a spark to ignite the pressurized stream of liquid oxygen that burst out of the ruptured umbilicus.’
‘I’m sure that’s what caused it.’
‘You also agree that the resulting burst of burning rocket fuel struck the nearby Interceptor, doing significant damage and completely incapacitating it?’
‘That’s accurate. But I don’t think there was anyone inside when it happened.’
She nodded helpfully. ‘No, that’s correct. No bodies were found inside the wreckage. Thank you for the clarification.’ She glanced at her pad. ‘And I’d say that’s plenty for today.
She rose and put on her suit jacket. Lech stayed seated.
‘I have quite a bit of work to do on this before I’ll be able to answer the claim, but I’d like to speak with you again tomorrow.’
‘Sure.’
She grabbed her pad off the table. ‘Thank you for your time, Mr. Karolczak.’
The investigator’s second contact came the very next morning, at the open of visiting hours. When the bailiff gave her entry she stepped up to the table and wordlessly slid her pad across to Lech.
‘What?’
‘Press play,’ she said.
He did. On the screen was a shaky, grainy video of floating debris and flashlight beams pointed at a line of four naked bodies. The caption at the bottom read, ‘Please Advise.’
Lech nearly collapsed and dropped his head to the table. ‘Oh thank god,’ he said. ‘Thank god.’ He looked up at her.
‘Did the company show this to you?’ he asked.
She shook her head. ‘No. And it’s on that basis that I’m going to deny their claim. Witholding information.’
Lech felt like he was floating. ‘That’s… great. Great. How did you find this?’
She cleared her throat. ‘You were right.’
‘What?’
‘The FBI examined blackbox data from the Interceptor, I believe assuming that the main drive would have been destroyed. It shows no interaction with the Arrigato computer.’
Lech nodded.
‘But the main drive wasn’t destroyed. I had a data forensics team on the station go over it last night and we found an archive. File headers and timestamps indicate the Interceptor acquired root access to the Arrigato via a company back door and performed a back-up of the entire contents of the Arrigato’s hard drive. The Interceptor also scrubbed the helmet cam records and the message you sent to Ceres from the Arrigato’s official log.’
‘Makes sense.’
She paused. He noticed she was looking at the floor. ‘We found another discrepancy between the back-up
log and the official log, however.’
Lech looked at her. She walked over to him, switched the display on her pad to a log file, and waited for him to read it.
He saw timestamps and accompanying activity, then he froze.
She inhaled and said, ‘Shortly after Ceres replied to your debark request, the log shows Ms. Ibarra used the airlock. Twenty minutes later, we have a series of six events — repeated engaging and disengaging of the umbilicus.’
Lech tried to speak but found he couldn’t get any air out of his throat.
‘It seems like you ordered a completion of the repair process, and that it was successful.’
Lech inhaled.
‘From my reconstruction of events, you deliberately took off with the umbilicus still attached. I believe you also deliberately set your flight path to add lateral tension to the line to increase the chances of a spark.’
‘I have no idea how to alter a log. That’s David’s department.’
She nodded. ‘I’d guess you learned how when you caught him doing it. Or you had him show you. A smart captain would, anyway. Did you undo the servo repair between Castalia and here?’
He didn’t move.
‘Why,’ she asked him, ‘did you strand those people out there?’
Lech said hoarsely, ‘I was afraid those things would know how to follow me.’ His vision was blurring, and he had trouble focusing on her voice.
‘Mr. Karolczak, whatever those things were, there’s no evidence they killed your crew.’
Lech moaned and pressed his palms into his eyes.
‘Autopsy shows those people died because they ran out of oxygen. You destroyed any access they had to the supply beyond their EVAs.’
‘What about the radiation? They told me the bodies of my crew showed well over natural exposure.’
‘Not enough to kill them.’
That ripped the breath out of him. He whispered, ‘I didn’t know what to do.’
The investigator stayed silent for a moment, then picked up her pad and stepped toward the door. ‘The company is claiming they didn’t recover any unidentified bodies, though the courts will force them to relinquish whatever evidence they do have, including the rubble from that chamber, or face investigation. Once the trial is finished, the evidence will probably be turned over to a research center somewhere.’
She waited for him to say something, but he didn’t. ‘I want to ask you,’ she said, turning to him, ‘what do you think you actually saw out there?’
He looked up. ‘You ask corporate. They know. And it’ll probably stay secret forever. Unless it happens again.’
She nodded. ‘Goodbye, Mr. Karolczak.’
She summoned the bailiff to let her out.
In the hallway she began a quick message to her higher-ups. The extraterritoriality of orbital stations meant no penalties for munitions-level encryption. It read, ‘Contained. He’s still suspicious, but it reads like paranoia. Expect nothing new to come out at trial.’
They’d want a fuller report, of course, but that could wait. For now, they had exactly what they wanted.
Lech stayed hunched on the chair for a long while, but eventually his back began to ache, and he traded the chair at the table for the bunk against the wall. The room was more spacious than it had to be, larger than any rig cabin he’d ever had, and probably larger than the single-person cells on Mars or Earth, where space was cheap. He thought perhaps the station engineers had simply designated the rooms as generic modules and were not aware they would eventually be used as holding cells.
He was also grateful to the investigator that she did not mention the other record he had deleted, though he retained a clear memory of it, of the last communication he picked up before he was out of range of the asteroid. It was garbled mostly, in between bursts of whiny static, but he was able to make out a single bit of it. He wondered whether she had called his name in fear of the sleepers or in fear of being left behind.
He cried for a long time.
When he was finished, his muscles registered the energy he had put into it, and the thin mattress in the canned gravity seemed more than comfortable. Soon his gravity would be real, and he would look out his window and see something other than a dusting of old stars. Perhaps his cell would be made of cinder block, and his table of wood. Or even metal would be fine. After twenty years, he could trade one tin can for another.
Sleepily Lech wrapped his arms around his pillow, closed his eyes, and thought of home.
WEIGHT
by Elizabeth Hersh
It started on June 3rd. I remember the date because I had just signed for the house. My boyfriend took me to see The Bodies Exhibit. One of those touring exhibitions that announces itself with pictures of corpses on billboards. Paints our fears right out in front of us, glues them to signs 30 feet tall and 12 feet wide to help wake us up on our morning commutes. Come look death in the face.
It sounded fun, but it wasn’t. The bodies are no longer human. They are propped up and plasticized. Everything organic replaced. They are maraschino cherries. All the flavor and color sucked out, replaced with chemicals. June 3rd: the day I bought my first house in a shameless act of adulthood and the day I first saw what a penis looked like without skin. Sad, limp yet hard and brittle like all the other plasticized organs.
All except the bones.
You don’t have to inject bones with plastics to make them strong. You don’t have to process them. They just are. The stone of our bodies. The foundations on which all else rests. Bone can’t surprise you, at least I thought not, until I saw scapula. Without the muscle holding them tight to the ribs and spine they float unattached. So delicate that you can see light shine through them.
‘Wings.’ My boyfriend said. Our wings. What was left of them. Not even deep under our skin. But useless and forgotten. So thin they are almost transparent. As if they might be fading out of existence even as we murmur incessantly to remind ourselves we are living in this room full of preserved death.
‘When you dream about flying, do you flap your scapula?’
That night I dream. Delicate wings struggle under skin. Breaking free and attempting flight. They don’t have much lift; it’s more a matter of will power. Three nights later the shoulder blades started appearing.
‘I had a strange dream last night. I was in my bedroom kind of, well, kind of exactly my bedroom down to every detail, and this thing was crawling on the floor towards my bed.’
My boyfriend looks up from his computer. ‘Creepy.’
‘Yeah.’
‘You want to sleep at my place tonight?’
‘It was just a dream.’
There is a certain kind of light, at night, in the suburbs. It’s a strange orange color and with it comes a soft buzzing sound. A hum and click. The sound of night.
It. Just an outline. Shoulder blades, as if someone is slowly crawling towards my bed. As if someone is purposefully moving in the almost-dark on hands and knees so softly and slowly that the sound of impact on the carpet is drowned out by the soft rhythms of the house. The refrigerator, the washer, the heater.
I try to shut my eyes. I cannot blink. I fear that if I even glace away I will lose track of its progresses towards me. That somehow my vision is keeping it true to natural rules. My sight keeps it fixed.
And then the street light goes out. The suburban night turning for a moment into truer darkness.
They do it to conserve energy. A street light will dim for a minute and then brighten. If you are patient or very bored you can watch the patterns on obscenely wide streets. We are so scared of the dark that our neighborhood’s over-lit mail boxes have four dim shadows. Even at midnight you can tell who hasn’t been trimming their teas roses. With one street lamp out you can see well enough to drive, well enough to walk, but not well enough to see the shoulder blades undulating across the floor towards my bed. Not well enough to find the pattern of the body they are connected to.
I count my breaths. Ten, twe
nty, twenty-five and the streetlight clicks back on. The thing is gone. It has snuck out in the dark, out or under. The heater comes on, a soft whirring noise in the orangey darkness. One more hum. One more sound, one more taste of reality and I can make it into a dream. Remember it as a dream. My cat pads softly by. She looks at me and then wanders off. A dream. At most, some half-awake hypnopompic image.
‘Your father has an infection from that damned halo.’ My mother is upset about the metal brace that prevents my father from being paraplegic.
I push the remnants of lunch around on my plate ‘He broke his neck.’
‘The doctors say the scars on his forehead are going to be there forever!’
‘Well, they did screw metal into his skull,’ my boyfriend says with a blank face and friendly squeeze under the table.
‘It’s bad enough to have him walking around like the Tin Man at our barbeque.’
The little bird sitting on my mom’s hat bobs its head in agreement. My back starts to itch.
‘Wren, stop fidgeting!’
She gives me the stern look that hasn’t intimidated me in years, but I stop.
‘I cannot believe your father is doing this to me. I can’t possibly take him to the club ball in that thing!’
That night my boyfriend smiles and does his best impression of her. ‘It’s almost like he broke his neck just to vex me! Wren! Quit your squirming!’ He pronounces squirming in a way that squishes in the first syllable. He has only known my mom for a few months but can nail her oddly locationless accent.
‘Really, do you have a bug bite or something?’ This time he speaks in the soft tone of the man I am slowly falling in love with. ‘Do you want me to check?’ He is grinning moving towards me.
‘It’s nothing.’
‘Are you sure? We better take your shirt off to see.’
‘Oh, you think that, do you?’
He comes at me, skirting the low coffee table.
‘Come on, it’s for your health.’
Fear wells up inside of me, unexpected and unwanted.
‘No, it’s okay.’
His arms react to the harshness in my voice. Freezing, pulling back.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, but the damage is done. New relationships are fragile, almost translucent; they haven’t committed yet to existence.