Bones Burnt Black: Serial Killer in Space

by Stephen Euin Cobb

  Progress was slow. It was like trying to clear an Etch-A-Sketch by running its tiny drawing tip back and forth across the glass a few thousand times in an effort to see the secret mechanical workings hidden inside the toy.

  Tedious as it was, there was no other way to wipe off the obscuring soot save going outside and doing it by hand—a thought Mike did not find tempting; at least not yet.

  His eyes burned from staring and his arm ached from the carefully repeated movements. Fortunately, the pattern of lines he had scratched in the soot now formed a reasonably clear window in the larger window of blackness—a window within a window.

  Removing his hand from the claw-glove, he flexed his wrist and elbow, then wiggled his fingers until they began to move normally. “It’s been four days,” he said suddenly, breaking the silence in the cabin.

  He and Kim had removed their vacuum suits two days ago—having waited until they were absolutely certain the pod’s hull contained no holes which were only temporarily plugged by the fragments that had made them.

  Rebecca did not respond. Still suspended across the rear, she remained inside her suit—minus helmet and gloves—there having been no reason to untie her and remove it.

  Kim, strapped in the co-pilot seat and reading a book on Mike’s pocketsize, stirred slightly, but did not look up from the text. “What?”

  “Four days,” he said. “It’s been four days since solar passage. I think we should be far enough from the sun to leave the shadow.”

  Kim lowered the pocketsize and looked him in the eye. “Are you sure?”

  Placing a hand on the location jet joystick, he raised his eyebrows. “There’s only one way to find out.”

  “OK,” she said nervously, “but be ready to get back into the shade fast.”

  Nodding agreement, he pushed the joystick to the right for a few seconds. Half a minute later the sun came out. Though far brighter than when seen from Earth, it was not bright enough to produce pain.

  Aware that the soot covering the pod’s exterior would cause it to absorb more of the sun’s heat than if the pod had still been clean and white, Mike tapped the window once with a bare fingertip. When this proved safe, he pressed his hand flat against the window. The glass was warming, but not alarmingly so. “I think we’re OK.”

  Kim touched it too.

  Without unstrapping, Mike leaned forward, bringing his face close to the little section of window he had so laboriously cleaned. “Let’s go see what the sunny side of Corvus looks like.”

  “All right,” Kim said. “But be careful.”

  Corvus’s dark side, illuminated only by the scattered stars, showed no features other than a back-lit outline and the occasional flash of sun poking through its ravaged interior. These visual clues provided just enough detail to discern that the great ship now tumbled with extreme slowness—requiring more than two minutes to move through one rotation.

  As Mike eased the pod around toward Corvus’s sunlit side, Kim unstrapped from her seat and pulled herself near him in order to look out the little square clean spot he’d made. He had to unstrap from his seat and move his head close to the window to prevent her from blocking his view.

  Their heads were now side-by-side, their temples and ears touching. They were so close to the window that several times Mike inhaled Kim’s exhaled air after the window’s surface had curled it toward his face. This intimate proximity reminded Mike how much he longed for her. Feeling a tightness in his throat, he worried that she might be about to see him cry. Mercifully, his emotional state was interrupted when he got his first good look at the extent of Corvus’s damage.

  He had known to expect a burned-out hulk but it was much worse than he had imagined. The great ship Corvus—the ship he and his construction crew had spent months helping to build—was now reduced to a hollow, soot-covered skeleton.

  Maneuvering the pod as close to Corvus as seemed safe—far closer than he would have if the ship’s fearsome tumbling had not slowed nearly to a stop—he noticed that the blackness that coated everything had a texture: it was fuzzy. Not a thin layer of fuzz like velvet or velour or even carpeting, this layer was startlingly thick; probably half a foot; thick enough to round off sharp corners and obscure small objects such as door handles.

  Most of the hull was gone leaving empty rooms open to the vacuum of space. Many deck floors remained in place; most noticeably in the cargo decks where there was little else to see. Portions of the vertical hallways were also intact; some of their doors still stood open, though some were closed and some were missing.

  In the engineering decks two of the four main fuel tanks could be seen as well as a dozen lesser miscellaneous tanks. All were either shattered or split wide; their contents long boiled away.

  The most ruggedly built chambers in the ship—the two emergency, two boarding and four maintenance airlocks—seemed to have undergone the least damage. The hangars had also held up well, though their large outer doors were off their guide rails and jutted from the ship at odd angles, resembling giant rippled potato chips so overcooked that they had been reduced to charcoal.

  The rad-shield was missing. Its foamed lead alloy had probably provided most of the rain of molten metal. The engines and their support beams were tangled together like old dead flowers—again, painted with black fuzz.

  Half the bridge dome was gone. The jagged edges of what remained reminded Mike of its explosion. He stared at the bridge’s ruins, shocked and confused. He’d never before realized how much he loved that old man. Goodbye, Larry.

  Kim touched his arm. “Hey, are you all right?”

  He shook his head gently. “No,” he whispered, still staring at the bridge. “I lost my two best friends in that wreck.” He was about to say that of the two, she was the greater loss, but changed his mind. The Kim he loved was gone, and this Kim would neither believe nor understand, no matter how hard he tried to expla—

  All of the pod’s remaining interior lights went dead. Illumination inside the pod dropped to one tenth. It would have dropped lower but warm sunlight streaming in through the little round window on the rear hatch formed a bright oval on the ceiling at the top of the pod’s front window, and this oval filled the cabin with a soft glow.

  “What happened?” Kim asked.

  Mike scoured the instrument panel for answers, but its indicator lights were all dead too. He checked the power readouts: also dead. Then he had a frightening thought: Could Rebecca have done this? He shook his head. I took her computer. To transmit signals now, he thought, sarcastically, she’d have to have had a computer surgically implanted inside her skull and hardwired into her brain.

  This last thought stopped him cold. If she could, she would! Then he felt ashamed. That’s just plain stupid! Paranoia; pure and simple. “Pocketsize, where’s the breaker box?”

  Speaking from Kim’s hand, it said, “Recessed into the wall near your left elbow.”

  Mike turned and opened it. None of the circuit breakers had been thrown. “Where are the fuel cells?”

  “Behind an access panel in the ceiling,” it said, “directly above and slightly behind your seat.”

  Pushing himself up from his seat and close to the ceiling, Mike’s feet floated near the front window as he opened the access panel. Kim joined him; crowding him again. The oxygen gauge read sixty pounds of pressure, but the hydrogen gauge read zero. “We’re out of—”

  Something big hit the pod. It scraped loudly against the hull and sounded like old metal crying. It hit hard enough to shove the pod toward its own rear at about two feet per second.

  Kim blurted, “What was—” but if she said more it was drowned under Rebecca’s scream as the prisoner swayed toward the front which pulled tight the ropes on her hands and feet.

  Mike saw the front window coming at him and Kim. Since they both floated freely, the pod and its cabin was now momentarily traveling rearward without them. When the window banged into their feet and knees they collapsed against the glass, bendin
g at the waist and slapping its rigid surface with their hands.

  It did not shatter.

  Mike bounced off, tumbling away over the top of his pilot seat. Stretching, he grabbed a handhold on the ceiling above Rebecca and used it to turn himself around. Kim, he saw, was swinging from a handhold at the window’s base.

  She pointed and said, “Look!”

  A large I-beam could be seen through the portion of window Mike had so patiently cleaned. Plump with black fuzz and slightly twisted, the beam was two feet beyond the window and perfectly stationary.

  “We’ve bumped into Corvus!” Kim said. “Or vice versa.”

  She planted her feet against the base of the window three feet apart with the handhold she was gripping placed exactly between them. In this position, she used her legs to rock her body vigorously from side-to-side while grasping the handhold as a pivot point.

  Mike puzzled over what she might be doing, then he got it: For every action there is an equal but opposite reaction. Each time she rocked, the pod should have responded by shifting slightly in the opposite direction. The shift would be small—inversely proportional to the ratio of her mass verses that of the pod—still it should have been obvious. But there was none.

  She quit rocking. “We’re stuck!”

  Rebecca let out a demented laugh. Her bound and suspended body responded by swinging like a two-person jump rope stretched too tightly. “If someone comes to see if you’ve survived—not that they will, but if by some miracle they did—they’ll take one look at this burned-out wreck and turn for home!” She laughed again. “They won’t even see you!”

  Leaping from the window, Kim stopped herself skillfully using only one hand on the back of Mike’s seat. Closing her free hand into a fist, she shook it at Rebecca. “Shut-up or I’ll shut you up!”

  “Ignore her,” Mike said. “She’s just trying to make you stop thinking rationally. It’s her last weapon. We’ve taken everything else from her.”

  He pulled himself into the pod’s front over the top of Kim’s seat, then placed the side of his head against the window and looked outside at a sharp angle. He wanted to know exactly what kind of grip Corvus had on the pod. As he moved his head all around, trying to see everything possible in every direction, he said, “She’s right about one thing: we’ve got to figure out a way to signal whoever comes looking for us.”

  “I’m right about something else, too,” Rebecca said.

  “And what’s that?” Mike asked with far less annoyance than he actually felt.

  “With no electricity, you’ve got no lifesupport; and the air in here is already beginning to get stale.”

  _____

  Within an hour the air in the pod was corrupted and they were all, once again, sealed inside their vacuum suits—even Rebecca, as much trouble as that had been: keeping the gun trained on her; blindfolding her so she couldn’t swing a fist or grab anything as a weapon; using additional ropes to tie each of her wrists to a handhold individually; untying only one of her hands at a time; slipping her vacuum suit glove onto her free hand and fastening its airtight seals; then tying that hand again so the other hand could be untied for similar treatment. At least putting her helmet on had been easy.

  Their prisoner, of course, had been correct: with no electricity, the pod had no lifesupport. The days that followed, they spent living in their suits, removing their helmets only to drink and eat.

  Shaking the pod loose from Corvus had taken two days. Mike and Kim tried forcefully rocking their bodies from side-to-side but succeeded only when they slammed themselves against the rear wall in unison. They had no light except suit lights and the sun; no radios except suit radios; and—thanks to their body-slamming escape from Corvus—the pod was now slowly tumbling.

  They suffered Rebecca’s occasional taunting for several days, until Mike turned her suit radio off. Partly he did this because he was tired of listening to her, but mostly because he was tired of keeping Kim from shooting her or beating her to death.

  Rebecca still taunted, but only when they fed her. Even then, Mike wished he could stick a gag in her mouth. But it’s exceptionally difficult to feed a woman with her mouth gagged. He learned this quickly. It was not only difficult, it was also messy.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Food and Frost and Memories Lost

  Twelve days after solar passage Mike turned and looked at Kim’s profile through the curved glass of both his faceplate and hers. Tapping on her vacuum-suited shoulder, he pantomimed: scooping imaginary food into his mouth. She nodded, and they began unfastening their helmets.

  They’d been using signals like these for days now rather than their suit radios in an effort to conserve the tiny hydrogen and oxygen reserves of their suits’ electricity producing fuel cells. Electricity was one of several things they didn’t want their suits to run out of. Like the pod, a suit without electricity could provide no lifesupport. Extra oxygen tanks, they had; extra hydrogen tanks, they did not.

  An annoying bit of irony was that the pod’s fuel tanks contained an abundance of hydrogen—probably enough to run their suits for six months—but they had no way to transfer it from the pod’s tanks to their suit’s tanks: a simple operation, provided you have the proper hoses, fittings and pressure reducing valves; which they did not.

  Cold air bit at Mike’s face when he lifted his helmet.

  As the pod’s distance from the sun had increased day after day, the temperature inside the cabin had dropped steadily. It was now well below freezing, and—thanks to the combined body odor of three people who hadn’t bathed or changed clothes in weeks—stank to the highest heaven.

  Kim raised her helmet and grimaced at the foul smells.

  Involuntarily, Mike’s body refused to breathe the chilly dry air based on its memory of the stench last time. After fifteen seconds he forced himself to inhale through his mouth. It didn’t help: his nose caught a whiff as he exhaled and his stomach lurched. He consoled himself with the knowledge that, if it was like last time, the nausea would soon pass.

  Long white jets issued from his and Kim’s mouths and noses as all the moisture in every breath condensed. These jets remained visible for a minute or more, rolling into little cloud puffs and wandering aimlessly about the cabin.

  Most everything inside the pod—walls, windows, control console, floor and ceiling—had become covered with a one-inch layer of crunchy white frost which had accumulated almost exclusively from the moisture in human breath.

  “So what would you like to eat?” Mike asked, as he scraped frost from the front window with the knife from his suit’s patch-kit. He popped a flat chunk that was almost too wide for him into his mouth. A few lesser-sized flakes got away and floated across the cabin; each one tumbling like a miniature model of Corvus.

  All three suits had run out of drinking water days ago and there were no more water bladders in their dwindling supplies. The only remaining source of fresh water was frost, but of this there was plenty.

  Mike grabbed the two largest tumbling flakes out of the air and tossed them into his mouth. “We’re out of chicken stew and pepper steak soup, but we’ve still got a couple of onion soups and clam chowders.”

  Kim scraped frost from her side of the window with her suit’s patch-kit knife. “Don’t we have any more Salisbury steak soups?”

  “Nope; all gone.” He did not remind her that they had only five more meals to divide between the three of them. They had never discussed the possibility of food rationing, since they hadn’t expected their oxygen supply to outlast the food by more than ten hours or so. They still didn’t.

  Kim shrugged. “I’ll have an onion soup.”

  Mike pulled a few food envelopes from his suit’s left and right thigh pockets. He’d stored them there so they wouldn’t freeze solid: an important consideration since there was no way to warm them. Reading the labels, he handed one to Kim.

  She frowned as she accepted the envelope. “These things get colder every time we eat
.” She shook it in front of her face. “This one’s got bits of ice floating in it. How about if we put them inside our suits? At least they’d be skin temperature.”

  He picked one for himself and put the rest back. “After we eat, we’ll move ‘em.” He tore open his clam chowder and squeezed some into his mouth, and immediately wanted to spit it right back out. The flavorless clot lying corpse-like on his tongue was so cold it gave him a deep chill; and its grease, which had curdled into slimy lumps, clung desperately to everything it touched: tongue, teeth, roof of mouth. Swallowing it with a shudder, he squeezed out another mouthful. Eat it fast. Get it over with. Try not to taste it.

  “Where do you figure we are?” Kim asked.

  “A little farther from the sun than Mars,” he said.

  “Any chance we’ll pass within a million miles of Mars?” she asked without looking at him.

  “Nope.”

  “Didn’t think so.”

  They finished eating without conversation.

  “So,” Mike said lightly, “who’s turn is it to feed the witch?”

  Kim answered, bitterly, “You know it’s mine.”

  “I was trying to be subtle.”

  “Then you failed.”

  Kim unstrapped herself and climbed into the back.

  Very slowly—so Kim wouldn’t notice—Mike twisted around in his seat enough to keep an eye on her. He was not at all sure if he should trust her alone with the prisoner. The last time she’d tried to feed her, she’d lost her temper and roughed-up the woman pretty badly.

  Kim checked the bonds at Rebecca’s hands and feet, then removed the prisoner’s helmet. Rebecca’s eyes were closed. Kim drew a hand back and slapped her cheek. “Wake up!”

  Rebecca opened her eyes and stared at Kim with intense hatred but made no sound. Secretly, Mike was impressed at Rebecca’s self-control—a trait he had never associated with her in her guise as Tina.

  In a tone indicating revulsion at having to pretend civility, Kim asked, “What do you want to eat?”