“Captain! Captain! Please come see this!”
Mira quickly rinsed herself, got her overalls on and came out of the container.
“What is it, X.O.?”
Hedi took her to where the cryo-drawers were, one over the other. Mira looked at the monitor the girl was pointing at. There was a red light in it. An alarm. Mira checked all the numbers. There was no mistake. The child in that drawer was losing all signs of life. The vitals were decreasing steadily to neutral levels. The boy was dying.
She knew that could happen. Children in cryogenics didn’t do that well. Something to do with the growing up process. It was a mess they had never quite figured out, in those days. Every time they put a child in a cryo-drawer, there was a significant chance it would go wrong.
Mira immediately looked at the vitals of all the others. Nothing particularly off.
“What do we do?” Asked Hedi.
Mira turned to her and sighed.
“There’s really nothing we can do, Hedi.”
The girl’s eyes widened.
“What do you mean?”
Mira shook her head.
“He’s dying. There’s nothing we can do.”
Hedi took her hand to her mouth, shocked.
“But… We could wake him up, can’t we? If something is wrong with the freezing, we can take him out of it, can’t we?”
Mira shook her head again.
“It doesn’t work that way, darling. The harm is done. If we took him out it would only kill him faster. The cryo-liquid would grab on to his cells and tear him apart.”
Hedi’s eyes started to water. She contained a scream.
“You know him?” Asked Mirany.
The tears started flowing almost immediately. Mirany took her in her arms.
“Come here.”
And the wailing came right after.
*
In the next few days, the rest of the cryo-drawers went into red status as well. One by one, all the vitals of the children in cryo-stasis dissolved into neutral values, dying. On the third day, Mira tried to wake one up, the one that hadn’t shown any signs of trouble so far. But it was a disaster. Not only did the girl not wake up, but by the time they opened the drawer, her blood had started to spill from every single pore in her body.
The event practically destroyed the spirit of the group as well. Everyone was depressed. From the little twins to Mirany herself. She made an effort and bravely told a lot of stories and sang to the children so they would go to sleep. But she herself would cry silently to sleep every night.
For days, routines were painful, and some were forgotten altogether. Sadness seemed to dominate the small vessel. Until one day, Mirany found Jona, the 8-year-old boy, looking through the window, melancholic.
“Are you ok?”
The boy tried to smile and then confessed:
“Today is my birthday.”
Mira looked at him, for a moment, and the boy showed her the date in his watch. Then she had an idea.
“That’s great!” She said. “Let’s do a party!”
With that pretext, she mobilized the children. They decorated the pod with anything they found, as golden sheets, flashlights and even built a kind of a fort with boxes of all kinds. They had a proper meal, as far as survival meals were concerned, and Mira even managed to make a kind of cake with some condensed milk. They sang songs and enjoyed each other’s company.
That night, when Mira put them to sleep, she felt more at ease again. And that’s when Hedi came to her once more.
“Captain. There’s a signal!”
Mira jumped to follow her, looked at the screens and sat at the controls. There was a signal. But she quickly made the calculations. A single signal, this close to the Mirox, but on this side. On the wild side. It could be a military vessel. But it could also be miners, or scavengers, neither of which were immediately trustworthy. And it could also be pirates or, even worst, slave runners. And the Janny was only a few days away from the Mirox. And supplies were scarce but not that scarce. Maybe they could make it. Maybe it was better not to take the risk. She quickly operated the controls of the computer and disconnected the pod’s emergency beacon.
“How long have they been out there?” She asked Hedi. “How long is the signal showing?”
“I don’t know.” Said the girl.
“When did you see it?”
Hedi grabbed her own shoulders, scared but not knowing why.
“Just now. I ran to tell you.”
Mira looked at the screen and saw the signal approaching.
“Shit. They’re very close, and they’re coming here.” She immediately started shutting everything down. “Get the portable heaters, Hedi. Take them next to the beds. I’m turning down the main energy. Don’t wake anybody up.”
She frantically changed course before shutting down the small cruise thrusters and all the lights and anything that would leave a trace to someone looking. Hedi looked at her confused, for a moment. Mira turned to her and stopped. She was so young…
“We don’t know who they are, Hedi.” She said. “We need to be careful.”
Hedi made a little nod. Mira nodded back.
“Please go get the heaters.” She asked. “I need to turn down the energy emissions.”
Hedi left, and Mirany looked at the screens again. She frowned. The signal had changed course as well and was coming towards the pod. They’d spotted the engine burn. They definitely knew the pod was there. And then the signal disappeared.
“Shit…”
Mira knew what it meant. It meant the other ship had left the signal on as long as it fooled her prey, but then it had turn it off to cover her approach once it saw the pod trying to escape. It meant they were probably hostile. Mirany looked back and saw Hedi starting to turn on the heaters. She pressed the last buttons, and the energy on the pod came down to a minimum.
She looked at the blackness of Space. She couldn´t see anything out there. For now. Hedi came and stood next to her, and she held her hand.
“You think…?” Started the young girl. “You think…?”
“We don’t know yet. Let’s wait.”
They waited for a tense few minutes, anxiously looking at the screens. And then Hedi said.
“There.”
But Mira had seen her first. It wasn’t a merchant. And it wasn’t a combat ship. Not a frigate, a brig, or a schooner. Maybe they weren’t pirates. Maybe only scavengers they’d be able to trade with. Negotiate. What were those strange things coming out of the hulls?
“What is that?” Asked the girl. Mirany quickly zoomed in. And then she gasped.
“What are those?” repeated Hedi.
Mirany was paralyzed. Her worst nightmare was coming true.
“Captain? What is that? What are those things?”
Mira swallowed hard and finally answered.
“Sacks. Those are sacks.”
“Sacks? But what are they holding? What is that inside them?”
And Mirany could only whisper:
“People. Those are people. It’s a slave ship.”
COMING SOON
THE DARK SEA WAR CHRONICLES
Volume II
MISSION IN THE DARK
ALSO AVAILABLE
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bruno Martins Soares writes fiction since he was 12 years old, and his first book, ‘O Massacre’ (The Massacre), a collection of short-stories, came out in Portugal in 1998.
It was followed by several contributions to newspapers, magazines and other collective books.
In 1996, he won the National Young Creators Award for Writing, representing Portugal at the 1997 Torino Young Creators of Europe and the Mediterranean Fair, where his short-story ‘Mindsweeper’ was translated and published i
n Italian.
His first novel ‘A Saga de Alex 9’ (The Alex 9 Saga) was published in Portugal in 2012, by publisher Saída de Emergência, within a series that features authors like George R.R.Martin or Bernard Cornwell.
He worked in Project Development for Television, and was a journalist and a communications, HR and management consultant before settling as a writer. He was also an international correspondent in Portugal for Jane’s Defense Weekly and a researcher for The Washington Post. He wrote several plays and short and full length pictures’ screenplays, and he wrote and produced English-spoken Castaway Entertainment’s full length feature film ‘Regret’, distributed in the USA and Canada in 2015. He lives and works in Lisbon.
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