Bones Burnt Black: Serial Killer in Space

by Stephen Euin Cobb

  “Mike?” said the whisper. “Are you alone?”

  “Who are you?” He whispered back.

  “It’s me: the ship. I’m still conscious, though not for long. I’m running on batteries. Your pocketsize tells me you are alone. Is this true?”

  “Yes, but why do you have to ask? Can’t you see what we’re doing through the hallway cameras?”

  “No. The power outage affects all ship’s cameras, internal and external, as well as the ship’s microphones and intercom system. I am effectively blind, deaf and mute.”

  “Then how can you talk?”

  “My radio com-link for relaying cellular phone connections has a backup battery system for emergencies. I’ve used it to call you through your pocketsize.”

  Mike glanced up at the open door on deck ten where the others were waiting for him. He saw no heads poking through the door looking down and watching him, but that didn’t prove that no one was standing near the door secretly eavesdropping. He decided to risk it. “Have you completed your analysis of the library information?”

  “No. And I’m not sure if my batteries will last long enough for that.”

  “Have you been able to eliminate anyone?”

  “Yes. Akio Yamaguchi and Tina Jennifer Bernadette: partly because they are too young but also because they have well documented personal lives which verify they were both in grade school on Earth during that time period. There is also no indication that any of their relatives or friends were ever associated with the event.”

  “What about the others?”

  “Gideon’s personal history is sketchy during that time and there is some indication that much of it was modified at a later date. I have not been able to determine if this was done simply to correct information that was erroneous to begin with or if it was a falsification of records—to cover illegal activities or to cover government sanctioned activities for security reasons.

  “Zahid’s personal history is also sketchy, but it does place him on the Moon during that time.

  “As for Nikita: her personal history is almost nonexistent. It’s more like it’s been wiped clean than modified. I haven’t been able to find out anything she’s done since she graduated college. I can’t even place her on the Earth or Moon during the time period in question.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” Mike said, “my arms are getting awfully tired hanging here. How about if you download the rest of your results into my pocketsize and I’ll read them after I finish climbing this ladder?”

  “If you wish. But before we end this conversation we must agree on a set of secret signals.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When I want to tell you something I will have your pocketsize chime like this.” Mike heard the gentle sound of a church bell ringing in the distance. “But I won’t speak to you, instead I’ll write my messages as text on its display surface.”

  “And if I want to talk to you I’ll just go off by myself and tell my pocketsize to call you. Same as always.”

  “Yes, but a word of caution: do not tell anyone that I am conscious. Not even someone you trust.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because even in my weakened state I am still a threat to the saboteur. And if he or she discovers that I am not dead, he or she will surely attempt to kill me again, and the next attempt might be successful. I can continue to search the library information for clues to the murderer but only so long as my existence remains a secret.”

  “And your batteries hold out.”

  “Yes. That too.”

  _____

  Still hanging from the handhold and half in and half out of the suit-shaped dent, Kim’s good arm was getting tired.

  Looks like it’s time for a better plan.

  Pulling out a pair of medium-sized screwdrivers, she grasped one in each fist and began stabbing her way back up toward the airlock on deck nine. Proceeding slowly, she made a special point of keeping the handles tilted away from her so that if one did slip it wouldn’t slide out of the foamed aluminum but instead would dig in even deeper. Soon, she became so comfortable with this new method of climbing that she ignored the doors and handholds altogether and simply stabbed a long winding path toward the airlock.

  It occurred to her that she was making a terrible mess of the ship’s exterior. Pausing next to a cargo door, she looked back at her trail of forty or more holes. Whoever owns this ship is going to be furious.

  She shook her head and stabbed another hole. Too bad. I’m way past caring.

  The emergency airlock’s door frame on deck nine was painted with red and yellow diagonal stripes and formed a one foot ledge all the way around the airlock’s clean white door.

  She continued stabbing until she hung alongside the airlock, then grabbed a handhold on its door frame and gently swung herself into position in front of the airlock door. Once there, she planted both feet on the red and yellow ledge and stood normally. The ship’s rotation provided her with about one third of a gee. It felt so wonderfully natural and familiar that she smiled.

  Man, I’ll be glad to get inside. I’m ready to rejoin the civilized world. She imagined herself sleeping in a real tube-hammock and eating real food with a real fork and spoon. This adventure is officially over.

  But even as she embraced these comfortable thoughts she became increasingly aware that a darkness was sweeping across the door over and over again about every five seconds. Deciding this had been going on ever since she’d stepped onto the ledge, she now decided it resembled a human shape. Is that… Is that my shadow? It swept across the door again. Yep, that’s me.

  Since mirrored surfaces do not display them, she’d not seen her shadow earlier, but now that it circled her endlessly it was impossible to ignore.

  Turning, she faced the sun. It appeared to be running around the sky in a huge circle, like a child playing with her, teasing her. She watched it through several circuits. Its path was a circle so large it divided the sky into two unequal sections of about one third and two thirds of the sky’s total area. Too much of this and I’ll get dizzy.

  Closing her eyes, she turned her back to the sun and tried to get her mind back on track. I’ve had enough adventure to last a lifetime. It’s time to go inside. She reached for the airlock’s control panel. It was shoulder high and recessed into the door frame on the right si— The control panel was missing. The place where it should have been was smooth and contiguous: unmarked, unaltered and most definitely unrecessed.

  She froze in position. Her confusion grew into fear. No matter how hard she struggled, it seemed, she was not going to be allowed inside this ship. Her pulse accelerated and she teetered between frustration and panic until she happened to look down.

  The control panel was on the left and level with her knee. What kind of a moron designed this ship? They’ve got the gravity upside-down! It was at this point that she noticed the airlock’s little window was also knee-high. This is crazy!

  Remembering something she’d seen earlier, she glanced farther down: past the ledge on which she stood. The cargo door with the big black twelve painted on it had been right-side-up.

  Scowling, she shuffled clues in her mind. That cargo door had been on the other side of the ship’s center of rotation, but on this side everything is upside-down, therefore the rotation has nothing to do with providing the passengers and crew with the convenience of artificial gravity. The final realization took shape. This ship was never intended to rotate. Something’s wrong.

  Regardless of the ship’s problems, she knew that her biggest problem was that she was still outside it.

  Kneeling to reach the airlock controls, she flipped the chrome-plated cover open. None of the indicator lights glowed. The panel looked dead. Hitting the button marked with the upside-down words Entry Cycle, she pressed her helmet against the door to listen for an air pump sucking air out of the airlock chamber.

  There was no sound.

  She pushed the intercom button a few times to page the
ship’s computer or captain. She wouldn’t be able to talk to them through vacuum, of course, but any idiot knew it was possible to press a helmet or faceplate against the intercom and communicate by yelling at the top of one’s lungs. Though in truth, at this point Kim only planned to bang on the thing to let them know somebody wanted in.

  She waited. Nothing happened. The intercom lights remained dead.

  Guess I’ll just have to do it manually.

  A little door no bigger than her hand, painted cherry-red and located about waist high was labeled Manual Cycling Controls. Sliding it open, she read the upside-down instructions for entry. She already knew the procedure but safety required strict adherence to any and all instruction sets provided. This was company policy.

  Whose policy? Who do I work for? She almost remembered—or felt as if she almost remembered—but the information slipped away.

  She finished reading.

  The procedure was simple. Step One: look to see that the airlock’s inner door is closed and bolted.

  Lowering herself onto her hands and knees, she looked through the little window. It was too dark inside to see anything so she flipped her helmet lights on. The three beams—one from the right and one from the left and one from above her faceplate—illuminated the airlock’s chamber nicely. The inner door was closed and bolted. Good.

  She stood. Step Two: open the red-handled valve to vent all the air out of the chamber. As she turned the red handle a jet of white gas similar to the breathing air she’d used to propel herself to this ship came spraying out of an opening in the airlock’s door frame above her head. The gas headed off in the general direction of the sun.

  When the jet faded to nothing it was time for, Step Three: close the red-handled valve, and, Step Four: unbolt and push open the outer airlock door, step inside, and then close and bolt the door.

  Once she finished these steps, she opened another little cherry-red door about waist high which was also labeled Manual Cycling Controls, but was located inside the airlock.

  Step Five: open the green-handled valve to flood the airlock chamber with air from inside the ship. A jet of white gas sprayed into the chamber along the wall near her feet. As air pressure accumulated, she felt a breeze: gentle at first, but growing stronger. Soon, air swirled around her like a miniature, if harmless, tornado. Smiling broadly, she felt safer already.

  The material of her suit began to lose its rigidity as the pressure outside it matched the pressure inside. Then, as the external pressure continued to climb, its material began to press against her skin more and more tightly.

  This was no surprise. Nearly all vacuum suits maintained air pressures lower than did spacecraft. The less pressure a suit had to withstand the lighter and more flexible it could be made, and the less fatiguing it would be on those who wore it while working an entire shift.

  The jet near her feet faded from white to clear, then disappeared altogether. Placing a gloved hand where she’d seen the jet proved it was still there. It was invisible now because the air pressure within the airlock had become high enough that the jet no longer expanded enough to produce a drop in temperature sufficient to make the water vapor in it freeze into tiny ice crystals or condense into a fog.

  When she could no longer feel the invisible jet through her glove, she counted out sixty seconds and then did, Step Six: close the green-handled valve, and, Step Seven: unbolt and push open the inner door; step out of the airlock and into the ship.

  The room before her was a cargo deck: wide open and populated with I-beams bearing coils of yellow rope. Its illumination oscillated harshly: bright, dark, bright, dark, bright, dark.

  Thin parallel beams of raw sunlight stabbed into the room through the little round windows on the cargo doors. In unison they pivoted, as if hinged on their respective windows, until their angles became too extreme and they all disappeared for a moment before reappearing through the windows on the room’s opposite side. Alternating in perfect synchrony with the ship’s rotation, they swung up through the room on one side and down through the room on the other, casting crazily shifting shadows while briefly illuminating narrow strips of the floor and ceiling and dust specks floating in the air. So distracting was this bizarre light show that Kim failed to note the room’s size and shape.

  Stepping over the airlock’s lip, she leaned forward and placed her foot onto nothing. Startled that the floor was not where it should be, she next discovered that it was not below that or below that or below that. Leaning forward way too far to catch herself, she fell screaming to a face-down impact on a hard metal surface four feet below the airlock’s door.

  Though her boots fell only four feet, her head fell nine.

  Her faceplate shattered, throwing tiny shards of glass everywhere. None of the flying glass got into her eyes, however, because in the quarter of a second before impact she turned her head and squeezed them shut. But a fraction of a second after her faceplate shattered out of its way, the side of her head bounced painfully off the unforgiving metal surface.

  Despite the odds, she had succeeded in getting back to the ship, even found a way inside. But now—the victim of a high ceiling—she lay sprawled on her belly with her helmet lights shining into the cold metal surface in front of them, her face bleeding and her mind unconscious.

  _____

  Amid the dim glow of three floor lamps Mike, Nikita and Gideon pulled as a team on a yellow nylon rope which stretched through a vertical hallway door, looped over a ladder rung and reached down into the darkness below. Up from this darkness, a wide cone-shaped beam of light played across the vertical hallway’s walls, sometimes illuminating Tina’s and Akio’s anxious faces as they stood watch at the door to report on Zahid’s progress. Behind the three rope-pullers, beams of sunlight swept upward through the room’s gloominess one moment and downward through it the next.

  The rope’s horizontal portion drooped and swayed then jumped as it became tight again. Inside the vertical hallway the cone-shaped beam of light grew steadily smaller and brighter but also more erratic in its movements, then Zahid climbed into view.

  Akio and Tina reached to help him. “Be careful of my foot,” Zahid said quickly. He hopped through the door into deck ten mostly under his own power and sat on the ceiling. The yellow rope went slack. Mike and Gideon stepped closer and stooped to help him out of the improvised harness.

  “Mister McCormack,” Zahid said, “is there any way I can have the medsys look at my foot?”

  “No,” Mike said. “Even if the medsys had some kind of electrical back-up system it’s on deck two and under at least five gees. We can’t go to it because of the gees and it can’t come here since it’s bolted to the wall.”

  Mike examined Zahid’s swollen and discolored ankle. He turned to Gideon. “Do you know any first aid?”

  Gideon shook his head, sadly.

  From behind Mike, Nikita said coldly, “I do.”

  Mike stood and turned to face her. “Would you mind doing whatever should be done for a sprained ankle? I’m not too knowledgeable about such things.”

  “Our resources are limited, but I can do a little.”

  “Thank you.”

  Walking a short distance from the group—now fully focused upon Zahid—Mike found himself thinking how similar to the ship’s computer Nikita had sounded just now, which made him wonder how long it might be before he would hear from the ship again. He pushed these thoughts aside and returned to the job at hand. “Akio, would you come here a minute?”

  “Certainly.”

  Mike led the young computer engineer through a sparse forest of stainless steel I-beams and stopped near one of the cargo doors. Narrow strips of sunlight swung downward through the not quite dust-free air and swept across their bodies with perfect regularity. He’d chosen a place where they could talk in relative privacy, but not so private that if Akio pulled out a weapon no one would see.

  Turning, suddenly, Mike faced the young man and asked in his harshest tone, “Whe
re were you and what were you doing when the ship announced that a power failure was imminent?”

  Akio stammered. “I… I…”

  “Answer me!”

  “That beautiful woman…”

  “Tina?”

  “Yes. After Gideon hurt her feelings with his joke, I followed her. I only wanted to talk to her. To make sure she didn’t do anything rash or foolish.”

  “And?”

  “She talked me into going down to deck nine with her.”

  Mike leaned closer. “And!”

  Akio took a half step backward. Sunbeams swept down across his face. The sunbeams seemed bright now. So bright Mike had to force himself to continue looking directly at the little man. Akio remained rooted to the spot, frozen with fear. His voice quaked. “She was trying to… to…”

  “To what?”

  Akio lowered his face and hid it in his hands. “To seduce me.”

  A smile broke through the rigid wall Mike had made of his face. Wow, that’s got the ring of truth! Suddenly, he not only believed him but felt sorry for him too. Mike had learned the hard way how easy it was to get suckered under Tina’s erotic spell. He almost asked if she’d succeeded, but instead forced the smile from his face and asked a more practical question: “Did you see her do anything that might trigger an explosion by remote control?”

  Akio dropped his hands but did not raise his head. “No.”

  “Were you with her all the time she was away from the group? Was she out of your sight even for a few seconds?”

  “I was with her every moment.” Akio lifted his head and looked straight into Mike’s eyes; his voice took on a pleading tone. “You will not tell my Yoshiko about this?”

  “Who?”

  “Yoshiko: my fiancée.”

  “No, of course not. Mum’s the word. In fact, maybe we should both forget about it.”

  Akio looked off into some imaginary distance, seemingly blind to the one sunbeam that kept sweeping across his face. He whispered, “I will spend the rest of my life trying to forget my guilt.” The way he said this indicated it was a goal he did not expect to achieve.