Bones Burnt Black: Serial Killer in Space

by Stephen Euin Cobb

  “Ship,” he said as he walked, “how much time is left?”

  “Fourteen minutes until power failure.”

  Mike stopped between Gideon and a pile of broken plastic crates from which had spilled many small bags of expensive name-brand candies.

  Gideon smiled as he handed Mike a rectangular battery. “There are at least forty of these here.”

  “Nope, sorry,” Mike said, “that’s a nine volt,” then added quickly, “On the other hand if the nine volt batteries fell onto this part of the ceiling then the C and D cells might be pretty close too.” He nodded to Gideon and tried to give him a brave smile. “Keep looking in this general area.”

  As Mike turned away his smile faded. Even if we find the right batteries they won’t do us much good if we don’t find any flashlights.

  Three minutes later, while across the room from Gideon and searching through a scattered pile of unbroken yellow crates, Mike heard Tina’s voice ring out from an adjacent store room. “Quit following me! I’m searching here.” There was a short pause, then, “Well, maybe I don’t want your help!”

  Mike turned toward the disturbance. Tina stomped in through an open door and began searching near Gideon. Zahid also appeared at the door but when he made eye-contact with Mike he dropped his gaze, turned and stepped back out of sight.

  Tina’s back was to Mike, so he paused a second or two to admire her legs. He did not find it surprising that the Libyan, or indeed any man, would want to help her. In courtship, proximity is always the first goal and helpfulness the usual means to achieve it.

  Without bending her knees, Tina reached down for a few objects near her feet. This caused her white shorts to stretch tightly over the curves of her butt.

  Mike’s nervous system—hardwired through millions of years of evolution—responded exactly as it was programmed: he froze at the sight and held his breath.

  The tightness of her shorts, combined with the visually dramatic shading typical of white cloth, seemed to do everything possible to openly display the sensual roundness of her backside.

  “Mister McCormack,” interrupted the ship, “I’ve been running calculations you will need to know after the power failure, but I must tell you the results now before it occurs since afterward, with no electricity, I will be unconscious.”

  “Go ahead,” Mike said, still admiring Tina.

  “First, the obvious: with no electricity you will have no radio contact with the outside world and no light except from flashlights. Worse, you will have no lifesupport system whatsoever. I estimate the breathing air in the decks that are still safely accessible to you will last no more than six days. Deck ten’s air, for example, should be good for approximately thirty hours.”

  How can she hold that pose in this gravity? Mike decided he didn’t care. She looked magnificent.

  Glancing between her smooth bare knees, Tina caught Mike staring absently at her rump. Completely unprepared—with no pre-planned direction to avert his eyes—he flinched, then stood there stupidly.

  She smiled serenely, as though pleased he found her body desirable. Her smile remained unchanged as her eyes left his to resume her search. Her pose too remained unchanged: provocatively bent over for Mike’s continued visual enjoyment.

  He turned his back to her.

  The ship was saying: “If, after six days, you have not succumb to the heat of the sun and are still alive, you may be forced to rely on bottled oxygen. There are a number of oxygen tanks in the—” The ship’s voice paused momentarily, then suddenly sped up. “I am detecting another coded radio transmission. It seems to have originated from deck—”

  All the lights went out and deck six disappeared into darkness.

  Mike turned to see if lights burned anywhere, but saw none. He lifted his hand and waved it in front of his face. He couldn’t see it: not even the faintest silhouette.

  Someone screamed in pain. The scream was loud and long and followed by two crashes and a thud. Mike looked in the direction of the scream but saw nothing. He didn’t dare take a step. The likelihood of stumbling over the wall-to-wall mess was as certain as its danger was great. He forced himself to stand still. “What happened?” he yelled.

  Somebody moaned, sucked air loudly, then moaned again.

  Beams of light swung through the darkness on Mike’s left. Ovals of illumination scanned the walls and the miscellanea strewn about the ceiling. They moved like search lights in an old prison movie. Mike counted four ovals emanating from four bright and wandering sources, and they were coming closer. One oval discovered the moaner and stayed on him.

  The moaner was Zahid. He was in the next room, visible to Mike through the doorway. He lay on a smashed pile of white plastic crates, curled into fetal position, shaking his head and holding his left ankle.

  A human-shaped silhouette—shining a beam of light in front of its feet—walked up to Mike and, without speaking, pressed a hard plastic cylinder into the palm of his hand.

  Recognizing the object by touch, Mike turned it on—recoiling when he accidentally shone its bright beam into his own eyes. He used it to light his path as he made his way to Zahid. On the way, in the shifting light and shadows, he realized it was Nikita who had handed him the flashlight.

  “What happened?” asked Gideon, already standing over the man.

  Zahid cringed as he rocked forward and back in response to the pain. “I stumbled when the lights when out. I think I’ve sprained my ankle.”

  “How bad is it?” Mike asked, as he stepped over the last obstacle. “Does it hurt to bend it?”

  “Yes, it hurts! It’s bad. Very bad!”

  Mike frowned. “I guess we’ll have to haul you up one of the vertical hallways. We can use ropes and a body sling. It’s dangerous—even more dangerous because of the high gravity—but we can’t leave you down here.”

  “You’re not hauling me up by rope! We’ve already dropped one load of supplies and I saw what it looked like after it fell to the bottom.”

  “If I understand correctly,” Nikita said, “you will not be entrusting your life to the idiot who’s fault that was.”

  _____

  Almost blew it that time! Almost waited too long before triggering the charge. The saboteur glanced at the worried expressions of the little group now gathered around their fallen comrade. Backed by darkness, the only light on their faces was that scattered and reflected back at them from their own flashlight beams.

  Stupid computer didn’t know when to shut-up. Well, I’ve learned how to silence things that don’t know how to be quiet on their own.

  Mike was quizzing Zahid about his injury.

  The saboteur looked down at Zahid, then up at Mike who was standing almost within reach. The saboteur’s expression grew cold. Your number is up, prospector. I’m going to enjoy watching you die. But not too fast! No, not fast at all. Your death must be a slow, drawn-out affair. I want to watch you die gradually, painfully. I want to watch you suffer, the way you made me suffer. And I will. Soon. Very soon.

  Mike looked the saboteur in the eye. The saboteur half-smiled at him. Mike half-smiled back, then looked down to ask another question.

  Haven’t got a clue. Have you, moron?

  _____

  Hanging by her tether and scraping softly against the mirrored hull of the giant tumbling ship, Kim yawned; then yawned again even wider. Man, I could use some sleep! I wonder how long I’ve been awake. Yawning so wide it forced her eyes closed, she raised a gloved hand to cover her mouth and pressed her fingertips against her faceplate, which slid them all a short distance apart.

  Surveying her surroundings, she noticed a hole in the ship’s gently curved surface just a few feet away. The hole was four inches wide and two inches deep and looked as though it had been made by a stray baseball striking the ship, but was actually typical of an impact between an interplanetary ship and a stray rock the size of a grain of sand.

  During such an impact—one involving speeds of many tens of miles per s
econd—the rock’s momentum was changed into heat, producing temperatures of many thousands or even hundreds of thousands of degrees. Temperatures so high that the rock, along with a similar portion of the ship’s hull, was instantaneously vaporized, creating a small explosion which blew a little round crater in the ship’s surface.

  A crater this size could easily let the air out of an entire deck, and would have if not for Corvus’s ablative meteoroid shield. The shield was a six inch layer of very light foamed aluminum which covered the ship’s stainless steel hull, and was itself covered by a mirror-like outer layer of aluminum foil. The shield’s function was to provide impacting rocks with just enough material to vaporize themselves in tiny explosive puffs of plasma without also vaporizing a hole in the hull.

  Most impacting rocks were smaller than dust—invisibly small—and the craters they produced weren’t much easier to see than themselves. On a ship traveling the solar system for a decade or two craters the size of a pinhead were fairly common, occasionally one might spot a couple the size of a pea or a even a quarter. The crater Kim found was a monster.

  Holding herself at arm’s length from the ship, she examined a larger area but spotted only two more holes: both pinhead-sized. Other than that the surface was almost flawless. Must be a newer ship. Odd that it already took a big hit. As she eased herself back into hanging position, she shrugged off the oddness. Hits are random and randomness never comes out even. Some ships get lots of big hits while others get none.

  Turning her head to the left, she sucked half a mouthful of orange flavored syrup from the suit’s feeding tube; then turned to the right and drew two sips of water to wash it down. I’ve hung here long enough. I’m not gonna get any more rested.

  She grabbed the handhold she’d been hanging from and pulled herself up enough to create slack in her tether. With one hand she maintained the slack and with the other she untied the knot.

  Handholds being so scarce—a fact that would not have been a problem if the ship were not tumbling—she’d decided to climb from this handhold between decks twelve and eleven up to a cargo door on deck eleven, then to a cargo door on deck ten. At that point she would climb diagonally to a door on deck nine and then laterally about fifteen feet to an emergency airlock she’d spotted while approaching the ship. The entire route offered only three handholds. As a plan it was risky, but at least it was a plan.

  The first five minutes went well. She slipped only once with a hand and twice with a foot and neither slip resulted in a fall. Clinging to the frame of a cargo door on deck ten, she paused for a moment to decide on her grips and foot placements for the diagonal climb to deck nine.

  That went well too.

  Safely on deck nine, she eyed her next target: a handhold halfway between her and the airlock. She inched along the door frame toward it, but arriving at the edge of the door realized that leaning out and reaching for the handhold was not going to be enough. It was too far away. She was going to have to jump. She tried to think of another way but after the exertion of the climb, her brain—desperately in need of sleep—was slowing down. She leaned out, counted three, and jumped.

  She didn’t miss it by much but it was enough.

  Sliding across the mirrored surface—as the huge ship rotated and she didn’t—her hands, knees and lumpy gear-laden belly scratched out a circle that touched decks eleven, ten and nine. As she slid farther from the ship’s center of rotation, she traced out larger and larger circles. Her circles became a spiral of ever increasing diameter. And she was sliding faster.

  The ends! I’m gonna slide out in front of one of the ends!

  She needed to do something, and whatever it was had better be quick. Instinct screamed grab something, but she knew that wasn’t likely to work, so she tried for invention.

  Yanking open her tool pack, she glanced through the tools and pulled out the biggest screwdriver she could find, then drew back and stabbed it into the meteoroid shield as deep as she could stab.

  The shield’s foamed aluminum—never intended to possess any kind of structural strength—yielded easily to the penetration and began to rip in the direction she was sliding. The rip grew into a long ragged scar which began to slow her. But after plowing a ten foot furrow, her grip weakened enough that she let the screwdriver tilt in the wrong direction. Immediately, it slipped out of the rip and sent her tumbling backward.

  The back of her helmet bumped lightly against the ship, then her toes did so, then her helmet. After two more back-flips she tried to stop her tumbling by again stabbing the screwdriver into the shield. She missed the ship entirely.

  Three more helmet bumps later she swung at the ship and succeeded in stabbing the screwdriver into the foamed aluminum. This stopped her tumbling but cost her her grip.

  As the screwdriver shrank in the distance—resembling a penknife stuck in the side of a whale—she glided along just out of reach of the ship’s mirrored surface. For a moment her reflected image distracted her by mutating rapidly through many distortions: her head, hands, feet and body changing size and shape—large, small, thin, fat.

  She spotted a handhold on the ship’s curved horizon that looked to be directly in her path. When it came close she grabbed for it, got it, and screamed.

  The velocity difference between her and it attempted to dislocate her shoulder as it swung her body ape-like around the handhold and slammed her face-first into the ship. Her immediate fear was of explosive decompression, but after several seconds passed without an excruciating death she concentrated on squeezing the life out of the handhold while she assessed the pains throughout her body. Her shoulder joint’s pain was matched by that in her knees, ankles and toes; though there was plenty in her chest—thanks to the suit’s chest-mounted gear—stomach—thanks to the bulging patches—and nose—thanks to the inside of her faceplate.

  Next she realized the universe was dark. This was not a problem with the universe, or even with her eyes. Her faceplate, as well as the rest of her suit, had made a dent in the foamed aluminum that conformed exactly to its shape—a dent five inches deep.

  Pulling herself out of the dent, she switched gripping-hands to test her shoulder for painful limitations on its range of mobility—it seemed to hurt equally in every direction—then looked around for nearby handholds. Predictably, there weren’t any.

  Chapter Nine

  Whispers of Long Ago

  All the miscellaneous supplies that had been blocking the door to the vertical hallway were now cleared out of the way and this portion of deck six was uniformly, though dimly, illuminated by two large circles of light on the otherwise undistinguished gray floor above Mike’s head.

  The lighting was Gideon’s invention. He had pulled two rolls of toilet paper out of a twelve pack and slipped a lighted flashlight into the hole in each, as though corking a couple of short fat bottles. This provided a wide base to prevent the flashlights from falling over when he stood them on end. He had chuckled and dubbed them floor lamps.

  Zahid had not joined in the chuckling. The injured man now sat in the doorway to the vertical hall with his feet dangling over the edge and one hand locked in a death grip on a rung about even with his head. He slouched pathetically in the two and a half gees, looking as though he weighed every bit of his estimated 400 pounds. Below his feet the depths of the vertical hallway were as black as a bottomless pit. The improvised harness Mike and Gideon had made of yellow nylon straps crisscrossed his shoulders, hips and crotch.

  Mike tugged discreetly here and there to check its soundness. “Now remember, we won’t let you fall, but we’re not going to haul you up. You’re not a twenty pound bag of supplies. We can’t lift you in these gees. Instead, this will be an assisted climb. You’ll have to climb the ladder with your hands and one good foot. When you create slack in the rope we’ll pull it tight and secure it. You can then make more slack and we’ll pull that and secure that too. And so on. Any questions?”

  “No. I understand,” he said without enthusi
asm.

  “Good. I’ll go up and join the others, and let you know when we’re in place and ready to begin.” Mike pulled a flashlight from one of the two floor lamps and placed it—still pointing upward and still turned on—into the pocket on the front of his right thigh. He tucked the pocket’s Velcroed flap behind the flashlight’s head so it wouldn’t block the light. Its beam shone in his eyes when he looked down, but in the blackness of the vertical hallway it would be far better than nothing.

  Patting Zahid on the back for encouragement, he sat down beside him and—easing the man’s grip loose from the rung and his arm out of the way—climbed out onto the ladder. He ascended carefully, straining against his own 450 pounds.

  The rungs in front of his face were lit from below by his pocketed flashlight. The light’s harsh angle brought out the rough texture of the paint on the wall behind the rungs. The paint’s surface looked like a vast field of microscopically small mountains.

  The illumination was distractingly unsteady. It bobbed and weaved and sometimes went out entirely—usually when Mike was raising his right leg and the beam shone into his hip or a large wrinkle in his jeans. When it disappeared Mike found himself swallowed by blackness. It was during just such a moment that he thought he heard someone whisper: “Mike?” He wasn’t sure, however. It was so soft and— “Mike?”

  He stopped climbing. He looked up, then down. Decks six and ten were too far away; the voice couldn’t be coming from either of them. The gees were down to about one and a half at this location in the vertical hallway so he held the rung with one hand and used the other to grab his flashlight. He pointed its beam up and down and all around but he saw no one.