Bones Burnt Black: Serial Killer in Space

by Stephen Euin Cobb

  “Aye, Captain. But can you do something about this centrifugal force? It’s not making my job any easier.”

  “Maybe. At least I’ve got an idea. Ship?”

  “Yes, Captain?”

  “Instead of using the attitude jets to oppose the thrust of the leak, I want you to use them to rotate the ship 180 degrees around its long axis. By pointing the leak in the opposite direction we can use the thrust of the leak itself to slow the ship’s tumbling.”

  “Aye aye, Captain.”

  “Kim, I want you to try—”

  “Sorry to interrupt,” the ship said, “but I have detected another coded radio transmission. It is similar to the first, and appears to—”

  A tight barrage of loud bangs reverberated through the walls of the bridge. The captain jerked to attention, straining against the confinement of his seat belt. “Were those gunshots?”

  The ship said, “I’m not sure what they— Captain, the attitude jets are inoperative.”

  “What?”

  “I believe those noises were a series of detonations designed to disable the attitude jets, and that the coded transmission triggered them. Our saboteur would seem to be thorough.”

  “He also seems to be eavesdropping on everything we say.” The captain tugged on his ear a few times before continuing. “I want you to scramble the com channel I’m using with Kim. Scramble both video and audio and change the scramble pattern every ten seconds.”

  “Aye, aye. Scramble mode is now engaged on com channel seven. Captain, Tina Bernadette is calling again.”

  “No calls! At least not from her. Were you able to triangulate the transmitter’s location this time?”

  “It came from somewhere in the passenger and crew decks.”

  “That only excludes Kim and me.” The captain grimaced as he squirmed in his command chair. He tugged at his seat belt as if it might be digging into his hip bones. “What’s the g-force at the ends of the ship?”

  “Nine tenths of a gee.”

  More than five times lunar, Mike thought.

  The captain began to ramble—clearly thinking aloud. “The main engines pivot hydraulically so as long as they’re running we can control our attitude by tilting them. If Kim can stop the leak and fix or bypass that ruptured fuel filter—and if there are no more hairs in the fuel itself—we might still be able to make our docking window. Maybe!” Again, he adjusted his seat belt. “How much fuel have we lost?”

  “Nineteen percent.”

  “How long ‘til too much?”

  “Three minutes, twenty seconds.”

  “Kim, I’m sorry but it looks like I can’t slow the tumbling and you’ve only got three and a quarter minutes to get that valve closed.”

  “Aye, Captain.” Kim’s breathing had become heavy. “I’m climbing a different route. Be there in about two minutes.”

  A wave of cold sweat spread across Mike’s chest at the sound of her heavy breathing. Val’s respiration had been running fast when he’d found her. Is that why Kim fell? She was poisoned? Mike listened as it got progressively worse and began breaking her sentences into chunks.

  “Kim,” the captain said, “why are you breathing so hard?”

  “The g-force,” She stopped to breathe. “is getting strong.” She did it again. “I couldn’t get through from that other direction.” There was a longer pause. “So I’m having to climb—” Again she took a deep breath. “through the structural steelwork—” And again. “of engine two’s mount.” She took three breaths. “This is hard work!”

  Nervously, Mike rubbed his mouth and both cheeks with the palm of one hand. Though why he should feel relieved that Kim wasn’t poisoned was a mystery even to him. After all, dead is dead.

  Maybe I’m hoping she died instantly; that she died without suffering. He thought about this for a moment, then realized the truth. That wasn’t it at all. He’d been deceiving himself. He was actually hoping to see something the captain had overlooked. He was hoping to discover that Kim wasn’t really dead—that by some fluke of chance the captain had been mistaken; that somehow she’d secretly survived.

  “Ship, how much time?”

  “Two minutes, five seconds. Michael McCormack is calling.”

  Mike jerked to attention. That’s when I called to ask why the ship was spinning!

  The captain shook his head. “Can’t talk to him now. Kim, you’ve got two minutes until we lose our window.”

  “Almost there.” She scraped a half-inch layer of frost from a section of I-beam before grasping it. The image shook steadily from her shivering.

  She must be cold all over, Mike thought. Her hands would be the worst. Suits have the least insulation there. She paused long enough to rake frost from the back of her right glove and wrist, then climbed on.

  Frost had so far not managed to cling to her faceplate. This wasn’t surprising, a faceplate is just a curved sheet of glass. Sure it’s tempered, laminated and treated with high-tech optical coatings, but it’s not insulated; warmth seeping through from inside would quickly melt any frozen hydrogen that touched it. But now loose flakes accumulated at its edges like the windblown snow captured on terrestrial window panes, and the view through it was getting foggy.

  “Kim, is your faceplate frosting over?”

  Her half-frosted green-gloved hand shivered badly as it wiped across glass. This removed most of the snow from around the faceplate’s edges but did nothing to improve the fogginess of her view. “It’s not on the outside. The moisture from my breath is condensing and freezing on the inside surface. I can’t wipe it off.” She exhaled and the fog became worse. “If this keeps up, I’ll be as good as blind in a couple of minutes!”

  The captain ran his thick fingers through his white hair. “If you can get that valve closed you should be able to hold your position and wait for the frost around you to melt in the sunshine. Then your suit will warm up enough for your view to clear.”

  “Aye aye.”

  In the foggy image from Kim’s headset the wheel of engine two’s manual fuel cut-off valve finally came into view. The wheel was twelve inches in diameter, had six thick spokes and was painted bright red. The red paint appeared the palest possible pink, however, covered as it was with a thin layer of frost.

  Mike saw Kim reach for the wheel. He also saw—perhaps at the same moment she did—that its valve was wrapped in a small coil of lightly frosted C-4. Kim stopped in mid-reach. The red light on the black thimble was not blinking. She whispered as though the thimble might hear her. “Captain?”

  The captain whispered back, “I see it. Don’t move. Just don’t do anything yet.” Mike knew Larry must be thinking furiously; trying to decide what to tell her; trying to decide what he would do if he were out there facing a bomb with no more protection than a standard vacuum suit. “Kim, the thimble is the detonator and it’s not blinking. If you can yank it out and throw it away from the ship the C-4 will become harmless.” Mike heard the sound of Larry swallowing. “Do you think you can do that?”

  She didn’t answer. She just reached for the thimble and plucked it from the soft clay-like substance. But she didn’t toss it. For some reason she brought the half-frosted object near her faceplate and examined it closely.

  “Captain,” the ship said, “I am detecting a coded transmission.”

  The captain jerked himself upright in his seat. “Throw it!”

  Six inches from Kim’s faceplate the thimble started blinking. She squealed like a stabbed animal and threw the tiny object with a savage forward jerk.

  Forty feet from her hand and twenty feet from the ship the thimble exploded in vacuum. So feeble was its expanding shock wave that as it slapped across her suit it managed to knock loose fewer than a dozen flakes of frost and to produce inside her helmet a sound no louder than a cat sneezing. However, though its explosion was small and harmed nothing the act of throwing it cost Kim her balance. Mike saw the image from her headset begin to shift. It fell backward about ten feet then st
opped sharply, accompanied by a loud clang.

  The captain shouted, “Kim! Are you all right?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Kim!”

  The image contained a close-up of an engine mount’s structural steelwork which was swollen with frost and terribly blurry because the steel was too near the camera to be in focus. The steelwork rolled to the left and came into sharp focus as Kim’s distance from it increased.

  Two seconds later the image contained a half-frosted engine nozzle moving sideways, rapidly.

  At three seconds there was another loud clang. This time the image from Kim’s headset disintegrated into a worthless field of static. Ten thousand meaningless black and white specks danced randomly within the image’s rectangular borders. The image of the captain and his bridge dome, however, remained unaffected.

  It was on the bridge dome that Mike saw, at six seconds, all four of the aft external cameras display a white and green vacuum suit reach the end of its tether and take a fierce and terrible jerk. A jerk so harsh it broke the tether, started the suit tumbling and threw from the suit’s surface thousands of chucks of frost.

  Mike’s eyes filled with tears. He had difficulty making out the details in the images on his little computer, though he continued to try.

  The chunks of frost scattered in every direction, the suit shrank with distance and the broken tether lashed about like a whip.

  The captain squeezed the ends of his padded armrests. “Kim! Can you hear me?”

  She did not answer.

  The captain’s fingers began to turn white. “Give me a sign! Try waving your arms!”

  She did not wave.

  Both Mike and the captain stared at the four images, straining desperately to spot some kind of movement—anything that would indicate she was still alive—but she only grew smaller and smaller with distance: a limp vacuum suit tumbling silently toward the stars.

  Chapter Five

  Gathering of Foes

  Mike wiped his eyes, though not very effectively. He tried squeezing his eyelids shut to force the tears out, then wiped them again. This seemed to work better.

  He resumed watching his computer’s little screen. In it the captain stared trance-like at the slowly shrinking white speck which was Kim. She was now so far away that her tumbling had become imperceptible. She was just one of the stars in the great blackness of space.

  “Captain,” the ship said, “the assistant flight engineer is calling.”

  Frank! Mike frowned. That idiot!

  The captain blinked a few times as if to wrench his mind free. He glanced around the bridge then looked down at his hands—still squeezing the ends of his command chair’s armrests. He opened them and flexed his fingers. “Good! Put him through.”

  A new image appeared on the dome. It contained the head and shoulders of a thin, middle-aged man wearing a loose and wrinkled shirt. His uncombed brown hair stuck out in several obviously unintended directions and the tip of his long narrow nose was red.

  This last fact sparked no curiosity in Mike. He knew that, for Frank, this was normal. The tip of the man’s nose was covered with a random pattern of fine red lines: capillaries permanently dilated by years of accumulated chemical use—liquor mostly, but also caffeine and nicotine pills.

  The man rubbed his eyes. “Captain, what’s going on? I just slid out of my tube-hammock and banged my head on the ceiling.”

  “Frank, shut-up and listen! Kim’s snapped her tether. She’s been thrown from the ship and I think she’s unconscious. Or maybe her radio’s failed. I didn’t see any leaks from her suit, but I can’t be sure there aren’t any. Get her coordinates and velocity vectors from the ship and go out after her. Scramble, man! Scramble!”

  “Aye, Captain. I’m on my way!” As the man turned to go his image disappeared from the dome.

  Mike heard an echoing noise somewhere behind him and glanced quickly around the hangar deck but Tina was the only person he saw. He squinted slightly. Shouldn’t the others be here by now? But he shoved the thought aside and looked back down at his pocketsize.

  The ship was advising the captain that he should get out of his seat and drop to the ceiling. The captain argued against this idea but finally realized he had no safer choice. The captain struggled with his seat belt. “I can’t get it open!”

  The ship asked, “Do you have a knife?”

  “You know damn well I don’t have a— Aaaaah!”

  The captain fell straight up from his command chair and crashed into the domed ceiling. He landed on his side with a hideous whiplash-like motion. His legs hit first, then his hip, arm, shoulder and head. Mike grimaced at the sight. There was no way a human being could land like that without breaking bones. Lots of bones.

  “Captain,” the ship said, “what is your condition?”

  The captain did not answer.

  The ship asked again.

  Again, the captain did not answer.

  The noises echoing within the cargo deck grew louder.

  Mike looked up from his pocketsize as the door on the more distant of the two vertical hallways swung open and two people in mid conversation stepped out one after another. They were too far away for Mike to distinguish what they were saying but close enough that he could tell by their inflection that the conversation consisted mostly of questions and no answers.

  First out was a short stocky man named Gideon Yehoshua: a fusion engineer who Mike secretly thought resembled a dwarf from Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Having spent a good bit of time with Gideon during this flight, Mike had developed a private respect for him similar to his respect for Larry, though not nearly as deep. He’d even given up his original impression that the fifty-six year old Israeli citizen was fat. He certainly didn’t move as one might expect a fat man to move: instead of plodding or lumbering, he was quick and smooth and graceful.

  Gideon’s hair was gray and thinning, though he was still a long way from being bald. He wore khaki pants and a matching safari shirt with two large breast pockets. His blue eyes were clear and sharp and seemed to miss few details, and his large thick hands moved expressively as he spoke—which at the moment was to the person following along behind him.

  That person was Akio Yamaguchi: a thirty-two year old computer engineer and the one person aboard ship that Mike was actually aware that he did not understand. It wasn’t that Mike had anything against him, it was just that it always felt like a struggle trying to hold a conversation with the guy. Akio was everything Gideon was not: pale, thin, soft, almost fragile looking. More than just quiet, he was inhibited to the point of being timid. Gideon seemed to be the only person aboard capable of drawing the young man out.

  His choice of clothing only intensified Mike’s confusion and discomfort when around him. To say his outfits were not work clothes was insufficient. They seemed tailored specifically to prevent the wearer from even considering any task that resembled actual work. At the moment, for example, he wore a yellow sweater-vest over a long-sleeved white shirt with beige pants, beige socks and beige shoes.

  “Mike!” Gideon yelled as he walked toward him. “The captain told us to meet you here. Why is the ship spinning so?”

  Akio followed Gideon over black electrical cables, blue ventilation ducts and white plastic junction boxes as though imitating a nervous puppy—uneasy about the danger of each obstacle and forever unsure of what he should do next.

  Mike lifted his pocketsize close to his mouth and whispered, “Is there anything else I need to see?”

  “You have seen all that the captain wanted,” the ship said.

  “Good.” Mike lowered the pocketsize and raised his head and voice to the newcomers. “We’ve got a fuel leak.” He started walking to meet them halfway. “It’s spraying out sideways from the engines.”

  The three stood in a small triangle. Mike and Gideon talked while Akio listened attentively—and occasionally glanced to the side at Tina who was still sitting, still filing and still ignoring them all,
seductively.

  Mike’s attention was drawn to the other vertical hallway: the one through which he and Tina had entered. Its door was opening with an odd slowness. When it stopped moving a narrow-faced man with thick dark hair and an even thicker mustache peeked silently into deck ten. His restless hands crept uselessly up and down the door’s edge as his dark brown eyes studied nervously those already gathered at the ship’s center.

  Recognizing him, Mike relaxed somewhat. It was the electrical engineer: Zahid Mohammed Kaseem. Weeks ago Mike had pegged him as a caffeine junkie; an already nervous man prone to too many cups of coffee.

  A female voice, strict and brisk, echoed from Zahid’s vertical hallway. “Excuse me!” the voice said. This was followed immediately by the sound of someone bumping their head against a door. “If you aren’t going through that door at least get out of the way and let others pass.”

  Zahid—one hand pressed to his forehead—stepped out into deck ten and moved aside for a tall attractive woman with bright red hair dressed entirely in black. Her pants and high-collared tunic were both of black velvet and around her waist she wore a thick black leather belt. This was Nikita Petrov: a design engineer. Even in low gravity the Russian-born American citizen walked stiffly upright. The bouncing of her long red hair the only thing about her that was loose and uninhibited.

  Gideon once told Mike that Nikita meant Victor in Russian, but also pointed out that it was a man’s name. Her real name might be Nikolena, he suggested, but her pride may have required that she present herself to the world with a name as strong as she felt herself to be.

  “What is wrong with the ship?” Nikita demanded as she strode into the group. “Why is it tumbling? The captain refused to explain.”

  Mike began telling her about the leak, and filling in details for Gideon and Akio. Zahid seemed reluctant to join them. He remained near the door to the vertical hallway. When Mike finished, Gideon called to him and the thin mustachioed man finally approached the edge of the group.