Bones Burnt Black: Serial Killer in Space

by Stephen Euin Cobb

  There was no reply.

  “Pod?”

  Still nothing.

  “Pod? Can you hear me?”

  Nothing.

  “No! Don’t do this to me!” Calm down. Calm down. Calm down. “Damn, I knew something like this was going to happen!” We’re trapped. I can’t even lift my—

  Something metallic, even bigger than the pod, creaked.

  The pod rolled forward and dropped away from Corvus, but zero-g did not return. The action of dropping away set the pod spinning more wildly even than before—three revolutions per second.

  Mike felt his blood abandoning his midsection and collecting in his head and feet. God, don’t let me blackout!

  The resulting centrifugal effect pressed all the loose supplies against the pod’s floor, ceiling, front and rear walls. Lumpy and irregular, this layer hid from view everything it covered, including the control panel and the front window. Only the two side walls remained visible.

  Stretching forward, Mike began yanking supplies—along with one pea-green leather travel case with a long shoulder strap—from the front window and throwing them toward the rear wall, hoping they would stay.

  He was tempted to ignore the front window and use the pod’s main viewing monitor—a twelve inch video screen mounted on the control panel directly in front of him. At the moment it had only two food envelopes lying on it, but because of his inexperience in a pilot seat, he didn’t feel comfortable relying on it.

  Its screen was divided into six smaller images provided by six tiny cameras on the pod’s exterior—one for each direction: up, down, left, right, forward and rear. The image for down had gone to static. During the impact with Corvus, most likely, its camera had been crushed.

  As soon as he’d cleared enough of the window to see outside, Mike grabbed the joystick near his right hand and moved it in several different directions.

  Nothing happened.

  Removing his hand, he read the labels posted around the joystick’s base. Lifting a tiny red-tinted plastic door next to it, he flipped the only switch in the little square hole he’d uncovered. A button on top of the joystick began to glow red. The joystick was armed.

  His first attempt at fixing the spin made it worse, then he changed it from a simple circular motion into a complicated figure-eight. He felt a growing lightheadedness.

  Reducing the fastest portion of the spin left only a slow waddling motion that eased his lightheadedness but made him queasy. This waddling motion also made the supplies—still pressed centrifugally against the floor, ceiling and walls—slide gently into new locations; though most remained out of his way.

  And then the sun came out.

  The pod’s cabin became filled with light that was both painful and overpoweringly brilliant. Blinded by it, Mike raised both arms to cover his face, but within seconds could feel the heat seeping through his suit’s insulation and threatening the skin on the back of his arm.

  Flipping his gold-plated face-shield down, he glanced very briefly through the front window. The sun was big—bigger than an orange held at arm’s length. He blinked a few times, then closed his eyes in an effort to make the sun’s after-image go away. It lingered, emphasizing its intimate proximity.

  Leaning forward, he held his gloved hands level with the top of his faceplate to form a sun-visor while he tried to read the labels on the control panel. Within his suit, he smelled plastic burning. Stay calm! Stay calm! Stay calm!

  An alarm buzzer rang so loud within the cabin that he could hear it through his helmet. It was the lifesupport system voicing its concern over the sudden influx of vast quantities of heat. The machine had become concerned enough to notify human beings that something might be wrong and that somebody might want to consider doing something about it.

  Mike continued reading. It’s got to be here somewhe—

  There! Lifting another tiny red plastic door, he flipped another solitary switch in a little square hole. A new red light glowed. This one was located between a pair of twin throttles, much like the throttles on large commercial airliners.

  He tilted and twisted the joystick until the side of Corvus that was away from the sun—its dark side—appeared in the window. He then eased the two throttles forward.

  Thrust from the pod’s main engines pressed him gently into his seat’s well-padded back. Anxious to observe a change, he watched closely but nothing seemed to be different. Then slowly, very slowly, Corvus began to grow. Sixty seconds later it was getting larger and larger and—

  All the sunlight disappeared from the pod’s cabin. Corvus had blocked the sun.

  With the sudden drop in ambient light, Mike was again as good as blind. While waiting for his eyes to adjust, he smiled and laughed and even let out a joyous little yell. He was about to ask how Tina was doing when his eyes adjusted enough for him to notice that the dark side of Corvus was still growing.

  He grabbed the joystick again and stared at the main view monitor. Rotating the pod until Corvus was visible in the pod’s rear camera, he increased the main engines’ thrust. When it looked as though Corvus had stopped growing, he cut the thrust to zero, then stared for a full minute at the image of the giant tumbling ship trying to make sure the pod’s location was genuinely stable. Satisfied, he searched for and reset the thermal alarm buzzer, then turned to his co-pilot. “Tina? Are you all right?”

  Glaring at him, her mouth moved rapidly but no sounds seemed to be coming out.

  He glanced at the base of her helmet just above the neck attachment, then reached over and flipped her suit radio on.

  “…the hell don’t you answer me!?”

  “Hey! Calm down. Your radio was off. You must have bumped the switch; or maybe it was hit by a flying food envelope or something.”

  “You didn’t hear me yelling at you for the last five minutes?”

  “No; and probably a good thing too; I didn’t need any extra distractions.” He looked her vacuum suit up and down. “You all right?”

  She shifted in her seat and raised both hands to her faceplate. “I think so.” With her anger fading, her voice sounded shaky. “I almost threw up.”

  “You can relax now. We should be OK. At least for a while.”

  “Where are we?”

  “In the shadow of Corvus. This is where we’ll make solar passage. If we’re lucky, enough of Corvus will stay together to be our sun-shield.”

  She turned and studied his face. “You ran simulations on this?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did it look?”

  “It was the best—”

  “That’s not what I meant! What are our odds of survival?”

  He hesitated for a moment, then decided she had a right to know. “Thirty percent.”

  _____

  Thirty percent? thought Tina. This is even better than I’d expected!

  Mike unfastened his seat restraints and climbed into the pod’s rear section to check on Kim.

  Tina smiled inside her helmet. I love it! You’re going to die a slow, horrible death and I’ve got a ringside seat!

  Suddenly, she had to fight an urge to laugh out loud; the urge seemed more than she could stand. She fumbled for the switch to her suit radio but the impulse faded before she could turn it off.

  I’m going to enjoy watching you die, McCormack. Enjoy every minute of it. She thought about the item she’d taken from Nikita’s dead body. And if somehow you do happen to survive, I’ve got a little something to take care of that too.

  Glancing into the back, she saw that Mike had removed Kim’s helmet as well as his own and seemed to be kissing her lips. Hoping to interrupt, Tina asked, “How is she?”

  Mike withdrew his face from Kim’s and spoke into his empty helmet like a giant microphone. “I think she’s all right. At least I hope so. She’s still unconscious.”

  “I hope she’s all right too,” Tina lied. I wish that stupid woman would just go ahead and die. What’s she hanging on for, anyway? Unfastening her own helmet
, Tina thought, I don’t know; maybe it’s good that she’s not dead yet. Maybe worrying about her increases his suffering. Maybe. At least I can hope.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Molten Rain

  Twelve hours later, Mike was again holding Kim in his arms while floating peacefully behind the pilot’s seat. It wasn’t particularly romantic, they were both in vacuum suits—including gloves but minus helmets—and she was still unconscious, but it was all he could think of to do for her at this point. He had already checked her body for broken bones, changed the dressing on her head wound and inspected her vacuum suit for ruptures, system malfunctions and other damage.

  During those same twelve hours he had also inspected his own suit for damage, had shown Tina how to inspect hers and had stowed all the supplies so that everything was tied off securely and nothing was likely to start bouncing around the cabin again including that pea-green travel case.

  He’d even been able to take a two hour nap after he’d discovered the pod’s location jets. Similar to attitude jets, location jets didn’t rotate the pod, instead they simply adjusted the craft’s location in three dimensional space. With them one could push the pod gently up or down, left or right, forward or back. They were perfect for a non-pilot trying to hide in the shadow of a large tumbling spacecraft. They were so easy to use, even Tina felt comfortable with them; so comfortable in fact that she had agreed to take the helm during Mike’s nap.

  This restful period, Mike knew, would soon come to an end. He now estimated they would make closest approach to the sun in something like six to ten hours.

  “Miieeek,” Tina almost sang the word. “You might want to get up heeeer.” There was no joy in the song, however, only a hesitant and uncertain fear.

  Mike strapped Kim to the rear wall to keep her from floating about the cabin, and climbed into the front with Tina. As he strapped into the pilot seat, he asked, “What’s up?”

  Tina pointed out the front window. “Look at Corvus.”

  He looked. “What about it?”

  “The hull. Don’t you see?”

  He examined it more closely. Portions of Corvus’s hull, especially the ribs along the edges of the mirrored panels, glowed a dim and very dull red. “Yes. Yes, I see.” So, it’s begun. Well, good. I’m tired of worrying about it. Let’s get this thing over with. Live or die, at least it’ll be behind us.

  Three hours later Corvus’s entire hull glowed red. Mike was at the controls when a window up around deck two, possibly in the passenger’s lounge, exploded. Glass fragments and a cloud of smoky black air blew away from the big ship, followed immediately by several pieces of blackened furniture and a large rectangle of heavy blackened cloth that might once have been carpeting or a decorative tapestry.

  A few minutes later another window exploded, then another and another. Within seconds windows were exploding like popcorn in a frying pan. Glass and smoke and blackened furniture—broken mostly, since most of Corvus’s windows were small—along with the charred miscellanea of everyday life were flying outward, leaving the ship in an ever expanding swarm of tumbling fragments.

  After two minutes of excitement, however, just as fast as it had started, it stopped. And once again the great red-glowing ship rotated quietly; though now with a few hundred, mostly small, mostly round, darkly glowing holes where its windows had been.

  In the long dull minutes that followed little seemed to be happening and Mike found himself becoming more and more groggy from lack of sleep. So he again turned the helm over to Tina and let himself drift off into a nap.

  He dreamt of farms and fields and forests, of rivers and trees and breezes, and of many other things outside his normal daily experience. Of good things. Of things desired and desirable. And he dreamt of making love to Kim. All this he dreamt in only forty-seven minutes of sleep.

  “Mike, wake up! Something’s wrong! Something’s happening to the window.”

  Mike jumped—not easy to do while strapped into a pilot seat. “What? What is it?” Then he saw.

  The pod’s front window was tinted like very dark sunglasses. He could still see Corvus glowing red from tip-to-tip but the view was dim, and it was impossible to make out any detail. Looking at the sky beyond Corvus, he couldn’t see any stars.

  “Is the glass getting weak?” Fear made Tina’s voice squeak a bit on the word ‘weak.’ “Do you think it will break like Corvus’s windows?”

  Unfastening and removing his vacuum suit’s right glove, he reached out and tapped the window once with a fingertip, then again, then three times. He pressed four fingertips to the window and held them there for several seconds. “It’s not hot,” he announced. He pursed his lips in thought. “When did this happen?”

  Tina shrugged. “It must have been gradual, I didn’t notice it until now.”

  Twisting around, he looked at the little round window on the pod’s rear hatch. He didn’t see any stars through it either. Better make sure. He unstrapped and climbed into the back. The hatch window was no bigger than the faceplate on the helmet he wasn’t wearing at the moment. Grabbing a handhold on each side of the hatch, he pulled his face close.

  The deep-black sky was full of stars all shining just as brightly as he remembered them. “Whatever’s wrong is only affecting the front window.” He pushed-off gently, grabbed the back of the pilot seat and pulled himself over and then down into it.

  While strapping in, he checked the monitor. The front camera was dark, the rear camera was normal, and the top and two side cameras were tinted somewhere in between. The bottom camera was, of course, still showing static.

  He rubbed his chin. “It’s got to be something in front of us.”

  Tina eased her helmet into her lap and casually verified each latch was properly open as though preparing to put it on. “But the only thing in front of us is Corvus.”

  “Exactly,” Mike said as he removed his left vacuum suit glove and opened a door on the control panel about the size of an automobile glove compartment. Pulling out a pair of plastic claw-like gloves, he put them on, then found and flipped their arming switch and waited.

  During the earlier peaceful hours, he had used his pocketsize to read about the features of Hyperbolic Shipping’s maintenance pods. From this reading he’d learned a bit about their mechanical arms—perhaps even enough to operate them.

  A pair of skinny white robotic arms unfolded themselves from a recessed compartment on the pod’s exterior just below the front window. Though possessing only three-fingered claws, the darkened window aided them in resembling the dead bony limbs of a human skeleton.

  Once fully unfolded they mimicked exactly the actions of Mike’s hands. He raised his right hand and the right mechanical arm came up; he pointed his finger at his face and the arm pointed a claw-finger at the window; he drew a circle around his face with his finger and the arm wiped a circle of blackness off the window’s outside surface. Blackness accumulated on the claw-finger’s tip.

  Opening his hand wide, Mike forced the claw into a flat shape and wiped it back and forth across the window. This produced a large clean area, and allowed his attention to shift suddenly to something beyond.

  Pointing at Corvus using his own hand inside and a mechanical one outside, he said, “Corvus has developed a tail like a comet. The solar wind is pushing it toward us. We must be inside it.”

  Most of the clean area was on his side of the window, so to see outside, Tina leaned closer to him. “But comets are made of dust and ice,” she said. “Their tails are gases that sublimated from the ice; and dust too, of course.”

  “True enough, but aside from metal and glass, Comet Corvus is mostly hydrocarbons: plastic and rubber and decorative organics—leather and wood and cloth. So its tail would be made of hydrocarbon vapors. And all hydrocarbons, when heated sufficiently, leave a residue of plain old carbon.” He smiled, oddly. “Soot, by any other name, will smudge as black.”

  Clung! A hard sound rang through the pod as if a rock had hit the
hull; not at meteoritic speeds of many miles per second but slowly, as if thrown by a human hand.

  “What was that?” Tina asked.

  Mike glanced around the pod’s interior looking for a cause. “I don’t know.”

  Clung!

  Mike turned to seek a cause in the back.

  Cling! Clung!

  He faced front. “What the hell?”

  Clong, Cling, Clang, Clung, Pop! That last sound had been made by something hitting the pod’s front window on Tina’s side; something small and heavy, and it left a mark.

  Clong, Cling, Clang!

  Mike leaned over to see the mark. It was a—

  Pop!

  One hit on Mike’s side.

  The one on Tina’s side had left a lumpy, lopsided ring of shiny molten metal surrounding the point of impact.

  Cling, Clang!

  The one on Mike’s side had left a similar ring, but of molten glass.

  Clong, Cling, Clang, Clung!

  With a mechanical arm, he wiped soot from the front window, making a clear spot shaped like a fat lightning-bolt. But what he saw through it—beautiful as it might have been in any other context—he did not find pleasing.

  Tens of thousands of tiny stars marched slowly past the pod. They resembled the special-effect stars that swept so dramatically past the Starship Enterprise while it flew at warp speed on that old two-dimensional television show. But these were not stars. These were fat little drops of liquid metal and liquid glass undulating, fluctuating and oscillating in the sun. Those in Corvus’s shadow—the ones that had a chance of hitting the pod—were difficult to see; they shone like dim stars, old and dying. Only those out beyond the great shadow, in the full light of the sun, sparkled brightly.

  Mike hunched low in his seat and drew his arms in close to his chest, instinctively cringing from the molten rain. Imagining the damage this would do to the pod’s externally mounted systems was much too easy. Isn’t a pod just about half plastic? And isn’t part of lifesupport mounted on the outside of the hull?