Bones Burnt Black: Serial Killer in Space

by Stephen Euin Cobb

  “I imagine the trajectory was only supposed to be aimed near the sun for a minute, at the very most, during the deceleration burn. We were in the J-maneuver for docking at Von Braun when the engines shut down.”

  “What?”

  “A J-maneuver is the standard path used by all ships large and small when approaching or leaving any zero-g docking facility. When done properly none of the craft’s exhaust strikes the facility and the docking is done on the facility’s backside compared to the direction the craft had come in from. It’s—”

  “I know what a stupid J-maneuver is,” Tina said, and to prove it quoted some old textbook on the subject, “Mathematically, the path of a J-maneuver is one half of a parabolic curve. It’s performed by running a ship’s engines while executing a gradual 180 degree turn. The rotation rate is not constant, but conforms to the… hyperbolic sine?… of the total burn time. Or is it the cosine?” She frowned slightly and shook her head. “I forget.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Mike said. “We’re not going to be doing another one anytime soon.”

  Gideon, sitting on the ceiling and leaning back against a ventilation duct, cleared his throat. “I just remembered an old joke my father told me.” He stared off at nothing in particular and was not smiling.

  “I could use a joke right about now,” Mike said, and he meant it.

  But Gideon quoted the lines coldly, without joy, and all the while staring off at nothing. “NASA has decided to land a man on the sun.”

  “Land on the sun?” Tina said, taking the bait. “That’s impossible!”

  “No,” Gideon said, “they’ve got it all figured out. They’re going to land at night.”

  No one in the group laughed.

  Tina said, “I don’t get it.”

  Gideon turned and looked her in the eye. “I’m not surprised. Not surprised at all.”

  Tina stood and stormed off—perhaps interpreting Gideon’s statement as one of condescending rudeness. Mike didn’t care. He cared even less when Akio jumped to his feet and chased after her. To console her? To explain that Gideon couldn’t possibly have meant anything rude? That it was probably just an allusion to the difference in viewpoint of today’s space faring society versus the old ground-based perspective of his father’s time? Mike had no idea.

  “The ship is calling again,” Mike’s pocketsize said.

  “Put it through.” He braced himself for the next bit of bad news. “Now what’s wrong?”

  “I just wanted to let you know that the fuel leak has stopped. This is good in that it means the ship’s tumbling rate, and therefore its centrifugal gee force, will no longer increase. But of course it’s also bad since the only reason it stopped is because the fuel tanks are now completely empty.”

  “What are the gees at the far ends of the ship?”

  “The bridge and engines are under a centrifugal equivalent of six gees.”

  Mike squinted. “That’s got to be a strain on the hull.”

  “It’s foamed stainless steel. It can take it. Although I estimate this craft is now approximately two feet longer than normal.”

  That was a mental picture Mike did not enjoy pondering. From the mixture of worried and startled faces on those around him, he could tell they enjoyed it even less.

  The ship continued, “It was my original hope that the hair would clog the leak and allow some of the fuel to be retained.”

  “About that hair in the fuel tanks—” Mike started.

  “What hair?” asked Nikita. “What are you talking about?”

  “There was human hair in the fuel tanks,” Mike said. “That’s what put the engines into auto-shutdown.”

  Nikita looked incredulous. “Human hair?”

  “Yes, it appeared so,” said the ship. “In my summary earlier I didn’t have time to include all the details of how the engines were sabotaged. When Kim Kirkland went out to work on them she discovered that engine one’s fuel filter was clogged with what appeared to be—and in fact may have been—human hair.” The ship’s voice changed tone slightly to indicate it was now addressing a different person. “Mister McCormack, do you believe the fact that hair was used has some significance?”

  Mike looked down at his feet and rubbed the back of his neck as he searched through a complicated tangle of many interlocking memories for a place to begin. He picked one and started. “Seventeen years ago, while prospecting on the Moon, my partner Richard Tyer died because his engines failed three miles above the lunar south pole. The investigators searched his craft’s wreckage and traced the cause to a fuel filter clogged with human hair. They also discovered human hair in his fuel tanks. The investigators decided it was some kind of freak fueling accident. I’ve always been uncertain—until now.”

  “I see,” the ship said. “Yes, it would seem that both sabotages might well be related, but if so, does that mean you know the identity of our saboteur?”

  “No, but it sure ought to help narrow the field. Tell me, does Corvus’s library computer include old newswire reports? Well, it wouldn’t have to be newswire stuff. How much information do you have on the Lunar Rover Smuggling incident back in 2022?”

  “The trial was in 2022,” the ship corrected. “The incident itself occurred in late October of 2021. On this subject the library contains four one-hour video documentaries; 14 books; 37 encyclopedia references; 62 magazine articles; 736 newswire reports; and 317 video clips, mostly of the trial proceedings and post trial interviews.”

  Mike nodded. “I want you to go through all of it. Are you familiar with mine and Richard Tyer’s involvement?”

  “Hold please.” Five seconds passed. “I am now.”

  “Good. Cross correlate all that information and you should discover who has the motivation, opportunity and peculiar mind-set needed to be our saboteur.”

  “I understand,” the ship said. “I will begin at once.”

  “Can you give me an estimated time of completion?”

  “Yes. Minimum: twenty minutes. Maximum: four hours. Most probable: seventy seven minutes.”

  Mike turned and gave Gideon a big smile. “Finally, we’re getting somewhere!”

  Gideon only managed a half-smile in return. He glanced at Nikita and Zahid and then glanced in the direction Akio and Tina had gone. Leaning closer to Mike, he whispered very softly but with a degree of urgency, “I don’t want to pee on your cake, but if the saboteur thinks you are about to unmask him or her might not he or she become a lot more dangerous?”

  Mike glanced around too. “Yeah, I guess that’s a possibility.”

  Nikita and Zahid leaned apart and squinted at each other.

  The ship announced, “I am detecting a coded radio transmission.”

  A cold sweat spread over Mike’s skin. “Where’s—” The muffled thud of a distant explosion caused all the muscles in his body to tightened and lock in position. He managed to blurt, “Ship, what was that?”

  “I do not know. I am searching all subsystems for any—I found it. There is a small leak in the liquid oxygen delivery system which supplies Corvus’s fuel cells. If not repaired there will be a ship-wide power failure in approximately… twenty-three minutes.”

  “Where’s the leak?”

  “In a one-quarter inch diameter section of stainless steel tubing that runs between decks eighteen and nineteen in the very heart of engineering.”

  “Do I have to ask?”

  “No. That area is experiencing five point seven gees. If you were there you would weigh almost eleven hundred pounds.”

  _____

  It’s a ship all right, but look at the size of it! Kim’s target had grown from a shapeless star into an object as large as a finger held at arm’s length. It might have appeared less imposing, perhaps even smaller, if it had not been tumbling end-over-end.

  Does it tumble to simulate gravity? Is that part of its design? She wasn’t sure; nor was she sure if this was the ship she had been aboard before her mysterious EVA.

&nb
sp; A distorted reflection of the sun’s glaring yellow disk danced and skipped across the cylindrical craft’s silvery skin. It did this twice for each rotation—once as the bridge dome swung into view from under the bottom and then again as the twin engines did the same.

  Glancing at her watch, she timed the craft’s rotation rate by counting out one rotation each time the engines rounded the top. After ten rotations, she stopped. Forty-seven seconds divided by ten. That’s 4.7 seconds per rotation. She frowned slightly. Wouldn’t that make the artificial gravity a bit strong? She shrugged the thought away. The engineers must have known what they were doing.

  Though still traveling toward the ship, she could now see the natural imperfection of her aim: her trajectory would not intersect it. She would miss by several hundred feet.

  Pulling out the patch-kit knife again, she waited until closest approach looked to be about three minutes away, then carefully stabbed a new hole in the belly of her suit. This time she aimed the jet of escaping gas in the direction she was traveling so as to slow herself.

  Again, she worried: Am I using too much oxygen? All this maneuvering isn’t going to do much good if I suffocate five seconds before I get inside.

  The hypodermic was now only half filled with its thick white fluid. She held it at the ready. When she estimated she’d come to a stop relative to the ship, she poked its tapering tip into the hole and squeezed the trigger. The jet vanished and a new white bulge grew on her suit’s stomach alongside the first. Before solidifying, the new one touched and then partially overlapped the old.

  Her timing had been good: she floated nearly motionless relative to her goal. Five hundred feet away, it completely dominated her view of the star strewn black sky. The tumbling ship appeared as large as a fresh roll of paper towels held at arm’s length—which would not have been so impressive had this roll of paper towels not been over two hundred feet long and the size and shape of a twenty story building.

  She tried to spot an airlock near the center of its rotation: one in a place where the tumbling would not sling her off. Scrutinizing the ship’s midsection proved fruitless. There wasn’t one.

  Damn. This is not going to be easy.

  Her attention became drawn, involuntarily, to the extreme ends of the giant spinning ship. A traffic cop’s radar gun was not needed to see they were moving faster than a hundred miles per hour. It was difficult to stop imagining herself getting in their way, and easy to imagine one of the ends swatting her like a big fat bug, knocking the blood-red bug-juice out of her in a single splat.

  Approaching the craft would have to be done with great care: the same care with which an unnaturally intelligent fly might approach the hub of a spinning house fan, ever wary of the merciless whirling blades.

  By swinging her arms in large circles Kim rotated her body until she’d turned her back to the center of the spinning ship. She then selected the two largest wrenches from her suit’s tool pack and, to make sure they massed about the same, shook each to feel their inertia. Placing one in each hand, she drew her arms back and, like some kind of ambidextrous underhand softball pitcher, threw them both simultaneously.

  Tumbling swiftly away, the wrenches crossed paths and bumped in the vacuum without so much as the barest hint of a clang. Bright sunlight flashed and sparkled from their polished surfaces as they shrank into the distance. Soon they were invisible except for the occasional, and ever weakening, flare of reflected sun.

  Swinging her arms in large circles once more, she turned and faced the ship. She couldn’t tell if she was approaching or not—it didn’t seem to be growing. She’d known the thrust produced by throwing wrenches would be small, that’s why she’d done it. She tried to remain patient.

  Sixty seconds later the change was obvious. Her approach speed, she estimated, was less than one foot per second, and the time until she would touch the ship was at least six minutes. Exactly where she would touch, however, was still not clear. More patience was called for.

  Ten minutes later she was much closer, but still had about two minutes yet to go. She spotted her own wildly distorted reflection dancing across the silvery surface as it rotated before her.

  Finally, she hit the ship’s mirrored side very gently. With ease, she absorbed her forward motion using only the toes of her boots and the fingertips of her gloves—the impact was that gentle. Face to face with her own reflection, she was again, at least for the moment, motionless with respect to the surface of the ship; and only fifteen feet from what would have been the ship’s rotational north or south pole had the object been a spheroid.

  The nearest handhold, however, was three feet beyond reach and she could feel the ship’s surface rotating in front of her. There was a distinct sensation of friction as her rubber-clad fingertips and boot toes began to slide. Clean rubber slides poorly on clean metal, and vacuum does nothing to improve this. The surfaces grab and jump, grab and jump, grab and jump. Each of her fingertips and boot toes began tapping out its own independent rhythm: every one of them out of sync with the others.

  Drifting very slowly in the general direction of her feet—downward, in her personal frame of reference—she gained tiny amounts of speed as she inched farther and farther from the ship’s center of rotation.

  If I slide all the way out to one of the ends, I could get slung off so fast I might never be able to get back. Or worse: I might slide out where one of the ends can swing around and give me a big bone-crunching slap in the face.

  Her pulse began to tap in her neck. Fear—as pure as it was useless—consumed her thoughts; until her toes, knees, and hands bounced gently across the ridges and seams of what appeared to be an eight foot wide roll-up style garage door.

  Hooking the fingertips of her right hand on the recessed edge of the door’s little round window slowed her, but also caused her body to pivot—half-sliding, half-swinging—sideways around the anchor point of that hand. In mid swing, the toe of her right boot struck one of the ship’s tiny external cameras mounted just below the door. This induced her body to roll rather than slide for a moment, which in turn forced three of her four fingertips to slip off the recessed window. She grabbed for the window with her other hand but missed.

  The centrifugal gravity-like effect was sufficiently weak here that she had time for one more quick grab. She caught the recess with two fingers: enough to pull herself a bit higher and get all the fingers of both hands in place on the window’s narrow lip.

  Hanging very still with her hands above her head and her belly against the ship, she felt a little extra pressure against her stomach from the two bulging air patches. She shifted position. The stomach pressure shifted too.

  Directly in front of her face, painted on the roll-up door in black with digits two feet tall, was the number twelve. Door twelve? No, probably deck twelve. And it looks like a cargo door.

  Pulling herself up, she touched her faceplate to the center of the window and took a look inside. It’s a cargo deck all right. In an effort to see as far as possible to the right and left she rolled the curved glass of her faceplate back and forth across the flat glass of the window. She’d been hoping to get someone’s attention—someone who might help her get inside—by banging on the door, but all she saw were coils of yellow nylon rope hanging on stainless steel I-beams. No help coming from in there. Gonna have to get inside on my own.

  Glancing at the ship’s surface around the cargo door for a handhold, she saw the nearest was five feet above her head: toward the ship’s center of rotation. She pulled herself as high as the window would take her, then reached up with her right hand and grabbed the door frame’s welded lip which was even thinner than the recess of the window. She used it to draw herself up until her face was level with the door frame. But beyond this there seemed nothing more to grab, and the handhold was still two feet outside her reach. She decided to take a chance.

  Placing the toes of her vacuum boots on the window’s lip, she began to stand up: gently, slowly, carefully. As her
head rose above the door the ship’s mirrored surface displayed a reflected image of her helmet which included all the details of her face and hair and eyes.

  Halfway up, her right foot slipped off, followed immediately by her left. As the tiny centrifugal effect slid her downward across the door, she clawed madly, trying to catch hold of any one of its features. She failed and failed and failed again. The artery in her neck pounded out a frantic beat. Lord God in heaven, give me a stinkin’ break!

  As the door frame’s lip slid by, her faceplate bounced off it with a clang so loud she thought for sure it would shatter and let all her air out in a single great frost-cloud of death. In which case nothing else would matter, and explosive decompression was surely a slower more painful way to die than being squashed like a bug. Her faceplate, however, did not shatter, and as the door’s little window swept past her eyes she had time for one panic-based reflex action. She grabbed for its lip, and caught it.

  Hanging by the fingertips of both hands, she closed her eyes and listened to her pulse, waiting for the adrenaline to ease and her heart rate to return to normal. Two minutes later she started climbing up, repeating the same steps, though with skill gleaned from her first attempt.

  This time when she stood on the window’s recess she stood all the way up and successfully grabbed the handhold above her head. Drawing herself close, she uncoiled her broken tether and tied herself to it, securely. She then eased her grip and hung limp as a rag doll for a well-deserved rest.

  Chapter Eight

  Screams in the Dark

  “Over here!” Gideon yelled. “I’ve found batteries!”

  Mike dropped the white corrugated plastic carton he was looking under and carefully stepped through the piles of miscellaneous supplies scattered across the ceiling of deck six. The gees were even worse now than before—about two and a half. So Mike, who would have weighed 180 pounds on earth, here weighed 450.

  The strain on his legs felt similar to trying to walk while carrying a very large man on his back but the sensations throughout his body didn’t feel like that at all. Blood pooled in his hands and fingers; when he flexed them they felt bloated. His toes were worse—each felt like a little blood-filled water-balloon. His feet and lower legs accumulated blood too but working their muscles helped shove the fluid back up into his torso; consequently, in this area, the swelling seemed limited mostly to his skin.