Bones Burnt Black: Serial Killer in Space

by Stephen Euin Cobb

  Tina stared at the marching army of fake stars. Her tone indicated more curiosity than fear. “What is that stuff?”

  He was afraid to tell her. The co-pilot also had flight controls, and if she understood the damage this was likely to do she might panic and attempt to fly the pod away from the source of all this molten stuff—right out of Corvus’s shadow and into that deadly sunshine.

  Clung, Clong, Clang!

  She looked at him. “I said, What is it?”

  He tried for a calmness in his voice. “We’re being pelted by liquid glass and stainless steel.”

  “Shouldn’t we do something?”

  “There’s nothing we can do. We’re just gonna have to ride it out.”

  Clang, Cling, Clung, Pop, Pop, Clang, Clung!

  He closed his eyes and made fists. God, if you’re out there: Please, don’t let this stuff burn a hole in anything! Deciding that was a ridiculously impossible request, he revised the thought to, just not anything that’ll kill us!

  Clang, Clang, Pop!

  Fear came back into Tina’s voice. “Mike!”

  Opening his eyes, he discovered a sliver of sunrise had burst to life along Corvus’s right edge. Grabbing the location jet’s joystick, he shifted the pod’s location to the left. The sun began to recede behind Corvus, but before it was completely gone from the right it popped out again on the left.

  “What?” But no sooner had he asked the question than he understood the answer. “Oh, that’s just great!”

  “What now?” Tina asked.

  “The closer we get to the sun, the bigger it gets in our sky. So now it’s too big. In order to stay in full shadow we’ve got to move in closer to Corvus.”

  “Closer?” She sounded as horrified at the thought as he felt.

  “Yep.” He eased the joystick forward and Corvus began to grow. He waited. Only when the great ship fully occulted the sun did he pull the stick back and stop their approach.

  Raising a mechanical arm, he began enlarging the window’s clean spot. As he started to clean Tina’s side, a huge white cloud exploded from an engineering deck along Corvus’s right edge. The cloud grew nearly to the size of Corvus and, back-lit by the sun, glowed as brightly as if it were sun’s surface itself. Even looking near it filled Mike’s eyes with pain.

  Seven seconds later he and Tina flinched as a hundred clustered impacts rang through the pod’s hull like a bucket of gravel thrown across a car’s metal roof.

  He opened his mouth to speak but before he could say anything another, though smaller, brilliant white cloud exploded on Corvus’s left side. It too was followed by a hundred impacts gathered into one massive assault.

  “Get your helmet on!” Mike yelled. “Get it on and seal it!” He grabbed his vacuum suit’s gloves and clipped them to his belt. They flopped wildly as he climbed into the rear. Tina pulled her helmet down over her head while Mike grabbed Kim’s out of a wall-mounted elastic fish net. Tina finished closing her helmet’s fasteners as Mike slipped Kim’s helmet onto her head.

  After fastening Kim’s helmet, he pulled his own helmet on and fastened it too. While slipping his gloves on, he spoke through his suit radio. “I think these explosions are chemical tanks rupturing: oxygen, nitrogen, water. Stuff like that. They seem to be throwing mostly molten stuff at us so far but as Corvus gets hotter they may get worse: bigger, more powerful. If they start throwing solids they might be able to—”

  Another explosion produced another rapidly expanding cloud and sent huge fragments tumbling away from Corvus. The fragments traveled off to the right, away from the pod. Mostly these were irregular triangles that glistened and flashed mirror-like in the sun.

  He completed his sentence. “—poke a hole in the hull.”

  A similar explosion on a different deck threw similarly large fragments directly at the pod. Mike saw them coming, growing larger and more menacing, but there was nothing he could do. He couldn’t dodge, couldn’t run. He could only wait for—

  Heavy impacts shook the pod. Their sounds rumbled through the hull. The final few played a high-speed game of tug-of-war, one slapping the pod around to the left, the next knocking it down, another shoving it to the right.

  When this beating stopped, a combination hissing and howling sound filled the cabin. Mike felt his vacuum suit expand like an empty balloon suddenly inflating. The loose folds and wrinkles of cloth which moments earlier had gently touched his skin lifted away from his flesh. They became stiff and resilient as the hissing sound grew weak and distant.

  From within Tina’s helmet she peered at Mike out the corner of her eye as if checking to see if she should be frightened.

  He said calmly, “We lost our air.” His calmness disappeared, however, when he looked down at the pod’s lifesupport readouts.

  Without an intelligent computer to monitor and guide it, lifesupport was striving to raise the pod’s internal pressure by flooding the cabin with air. Considering there was a hole in the hull, this action was not only futile, it was also stupid. But the automatics built into lifesupport didn’t pause to think of this, since they were not able to think.

  Mike turned to Tina. “Find the puncture.”

  “What?”

  “Find it. Find the hole in the hull!”

  Never having patched a hull leak before, he had no idea where the pod’s patch-kit might be stored—and he was in no the mood to start searching for it now. And while it was also true that he’d never patched a suit leak during an actual emergency at least he’d been through the safety drill for patching suit leaks—not once but hundreds of times. Company rules required every space-faring employee do it once a week, and he’d been with Hyperbolic Shipping for fifteen years. Granted, there were significant differences between patch-kits for hulls and those for suits, but self-hardening plastic foam was still just self-hardening plastic foam.

  Shoving a gloved hand into his vacuum suit’s thigh pocket, he dug around for the patch-kit, pulled it out, opened it and removed the hypodermic, but did not remove the hypodermic’s cap.

  Glancing at Tina, he was tempted to ask if she’d found it yet, but then imagined her reply: If I’ve found it, why am I still looking?

  Her helmet blocked intermittently one of the interior lights as she floated above her seat, scrutinizing the ceiling near the top of the front window. Bare hull showed up there; if you can call the inner-most layer of a four-layer hull “bare.” At least it was bare in the sense that it was not hidden behind permanently mounted equipment, controls, furniture, or other miscellaneous gear—something that could not be said about most of the pod’s hull.

  Mike had already begun to worry that the hole may be somewhere not only hidden visually, but completely inaccessible. He unfastened his seat belt and flipped himself upside-down to look in the foot area. If it’s behind this control panel we’re in trouble. There’s no way I can take it off the wall. Maybe I shouldn’t be looking for the hole. Maybe I should figure out how to make lifesupport stop dumping air into the cabin first, and then look for the hole. But he knew that could take anywhere from a minute to an hour.

  The silence of vacuum—which he usually enjoyed—was beginning to wear on his nerves. It felt ominous, almost evil. I can’t tell if anything’s striking the hull.

  He pressed his helmet against the metallic floor to listen. He heard a few random hits but they were small, then there was another fierce barrage of heavy impacts. Several fragments hit the hull hard enough, and vibrated his helmet loud enough, to produce pain.

  Tina shouted, “Found it!” while pointing with gloved fingers to a narrow slit of a hole three inches long and a quarter inch wide located in the ceiling at the top of the front window directly above Mike’s chair.

  Mike climbed out of the foot area and joined her.

  The slit was as neat and clean as if it had been part of the craft’s original design and had been cut in the hull by skilled machinists. The fragment that made it was missing.

  Probably blown ou
t by the escaping air, Mike thought, as he uncapped the hypodermic, pointed the tip at the hole and squeezed the trigger.

  Thick white fluid flowed out. With it, Mike drew a white line along one side of the slit-shaped hole. The fluid bubbled and grew and quickly reached the hole’s edge. Some bubbles disappeared into the hole, but the bubbling mass grew too fast for all of it to get sucked in. The mass expanded and covered the hole and continued to grow. It was as big as half a basketball when it suddenly congealed.

  Within seconds, Mike felt his suit lose its rigidity. He looked at Tina and she looked at him, but neither spoke or displayed emotion.

  A soft hissing sound rose out of the silence. The sound grew louder until it was far too loud. And then it stopped.

  He smiled. “We have normal air pressure.”

  She smiled back.

  “But don’t take your helmet off,” he added quickly. “Stay in full suit. We might lose pressure again before this is over.”

  He climbed back into his seat and strapped in. Tina did the same.

  Searching the control panel for the lifesupport controls, within a few minutes he deciphered the secret of how to make the stupid machine stop wasting air by trying to flood the cabin during a hull leak.

  Wish I knew how much damage all these impacts are doing to our externally mounted systems. I wish I could see—

  The arms! They have cameras!

  Scanning the toggle switches next to the monitor, he located those that activated the mechanical arm cameras. Two new images appeared when he flipped them. Both showed dark starry skies.

  He pulled the claw-gloves on over his vacuum suit’s gloves, but was too anxious to adjust them for the larger size, so he only got them halfway on. When he held his arms out with his hands pointing back at his face the two new images on the monitor shifted to include most of the pod’s front. The front window was visible, and through it, Tina and he could be seen in vacuum suits—she sitting normally and he with his arms stretched out awkwardly in front of him.

  The pod’s front was no longer white, but a dirty dark grey. There were holes, narrow and deep, burned black into the hull’s insulation. Jagged fragments protruded like splintered knife blades broken off from dozens of stab wounds. And everywhere: re-solidified beads—silvery of stainless steel and crystalline of glass. The beads all twinkled like little stars in a dirty-grey soot-covered night.

  Swinging an arm up, Mike pointed his hand down toward the top of his head. Soot and stabs and beads were not uniformly spread on the pod’s roof. They thinned out gradually across the curved surface toward the craft’s rear which remained relatively clean and unscathed.

  Mike was most concerned, however, about the heat exchangers. There were two, mounted about six feet apart, high on the pod’s two sides like the remaining tufts of hair above a bald man’s ears.

  Their design was simple enough: hundreds of parallel aluminum vanes painted black, held together by several yards of aluminum tubing also painted black, protected by nothing more than rectangular wire cages not painted at all.

  All the heat exchanger vanes closest to the pod’s front were beaten and dented and jammed with small fragments of glass and metal. Bringing the camera in close to one of the heat exchangers, Mike searched for vapor jets, streamers, gas clouds, anything that might indicate a coolant leak. As he played the camera around to examine the unit from different angles, a fragment like a ragged ninja throwing-star hit it, bending vanes and imbedding itself deeply into the protective wire mesh.

  Another fragment hit; then another. The image displayed by the monitor shook wildly. Clanging noises on the hull announced they were under another fragment barrage. Thunder rolled through the cabin, and another earthquake shook their claustrophobic little universe. During the worst of this, the image of the heat exchanger disappeared from the monitor screen and was replaced by static.

  Pulling his hand down, Mike looked at the mechanical arm outside. Its hand and forearm were missing all the way down to the elbow.

  Suddenly, a pure white cloud of gas a dozen times too bright to look at without pain erupted from Corvus’s far side. In under a second it swelled to fifty times the size of Corvus and seemed destined to fill the entire sky. The great ship was silhouetted pitch-black against this vast sheet of blinding white.

  And then the ship began to grow.

  Impossible!

  Corvus grew larger.

  It can’t!

  The tumbling ship was now twice as large.

  Mike screamed—if not out loud, in his heart and in his mind. He screamed like a chimp caught in a bear trap. The huge ship was lumbering forward: a mountain coming to crush him. Having tried throwing everything else, this explosion now threw Corvus itself at the pod.

  The bridge dome swung downward into, and then out of, view. Corvus’s tail swung by even closer. Mike caught a glimpse of an engine tilted to one side, as if dangling by a single I-beam.

  Still growing, Corvus seemed to be shifting slightly to the left. Could it miss us? Could it—

  The sun came out.

  Mike screamed again—not in fear this time, but in pain. The light seemed to be burning holes though the backs of his eyes. Clamping his eyes shut did nothing. Even covering his faceplate with both forearms wasn’t enough. The burning pain continued, as did his scream.

  The thermal alarm buzzer sounded and worked its way in through his helmet. Tina’s screams also entered Mike’s helmet, courtesy of their suit radios, but Mike didn’t notice either of these. Halfway to panic, he barely heard his own scream.

  After a number of seconds of indecision, he forced himself to pull one arm away from his face and feel about blindly for the attitude jet joystick. When he found it, he turned the pod around to face away from the sun.

  Intense light streamed in through the little round window on the hatch. The glare—reflected from the back of the pilot seat—filled the cabin with more light than would be found in the brightest surgical operating theater. Mike squeezed his eyes into narrow slits. Seeing was painful, but no longer impossible.

  He spotted Corvus out the front window. Though burned and blackened, it was so brightly lit that its red glow was invisible. It now appeared white.

  It seemed an ungainly colossus, not just tumbling, but running away; trying to escape from this pesky little pod to go off on some mad quest of its own.

  Then the bridge dome exploded.

  Larreeeeeeee! Mike felt his throat tighten; thought for a moment he would cry; but he knew there was no time for that. Later, there would be time. Later, if he survived.

  Twisting in his seat, he glanced into the pod’s rear and used one hand to shield his eyes against the glare. The shaft of sunlight streaming in through the hatch window looked like an eight inch wide laser beam fired into the pod from some kind of military super-weapon. Dust motes that foolishly drifted into its cylindrical path burned slowly into tiny puffs of gray smoke.

  Kim was exactly where he’d left her: strapped securely to the rear wall next to the hatch. Her condition seemed unchanged. Still, he worried and looked at her face, carefully. He had good reason.

  The paint on the rear wall around her was turning brown and giving off white smoke. Not the entire rear wall—some parts were better insulated than others. The portions turning brown were those which hid the structural ribbing that reinforced the pod’s hull. The ribs had displaced some of the insulation during the craft’s design. Consequently, the brown areas formed vertical and diagonal lines, which joined to form a network of large triangles.

  Where the white smoke appeared it did not rise, but hugged the wall and grew dense. Or tried to—breezes from ventilation ducts raked at it, tore it into chucks and began spreading it throughout the cabin.

  Mike shoved the main engine throttles all the way forward. Their thrust pressed him into his seat. He grabbed the attitude jet joystick and waited, poised for action.

  As Einstein said long ago: an acceleration is indistinguishable from a gravi
tational field. The smoke must have known this, for it began to rise—toward the front window.

  Half a mile away, Corvus stopped shrinking and started growing. Mike could also see that the pod’s interior was filling with a thin white smoke.

  Sixty seconds later, Corvus had grown to fill most of the sky and had passed the pod on the right. The smoke, meanwhile, had thickened and was making it difficult to see.

  Then the operating room lights went out. The pod had re-entered the shadow.

  Mike spun the little craft around one hundred and eighty degrees to use the main engines to slow the pod to a stop relative to the giant ship and its giant shadow.

  Smoke was now so thick Mike could no longer see the control panel. Lifting a hand to his face, it appeared suddenly out of the foggy whiteness just ten inches from his eyes.

  Sunlight came screaming in through the front window. It scattered throughout the smoke and filled every cubic micron of the pod’s interior. Again, Mike was blind. And again, there was terrible pain.

  Yanking his arms up, he tried in vain to cover his faceplate. It was useless. There was nothing he could do, except wait for the pod’s engines to stop the pod and push it back into the shadow. If—and only if—he had aimed the craft correctly.

  Squirming in pain, he counted off the seconds. Then the sun went out, the pod went dark and the pain dwindled to a manageable level.

  He pulled the throttles back to zero and waited for his eyes to adjust. When he could focus on his gloved hand pressed against his faceplate, he unstrapped himself and leaned close to the front window. The smoke was so thick between the window and his faceplate that he could just barely make out the shape of Corvus.

  “Tina, is your vacuum suit properly sealed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure? Because if you’re wrong, what I’m about to do is going to hurt worse than any pain you’ve ever known, and then it will kill you.”

  “I’m sure.”