by T. S. Smith
4
There was no gravity, nothing to hold them down or to set their minds at ease as the crew made their way through the cargo deck of the Athena II on the other side of the UDS. The supply room was filled with iron containers that were stacked one upon the other and were locked down with steel rivets onto a shelving platform that ran throughout the deck in thirty-meter columns. Above the platform hung a large mechanical claw-like device that would run along suspended tracks and lift the iron boxes to their desired locations, this of course had there been gravitational force present and a crew to operate the machine. The search team spread through the columns of containers, using the tanks on their skins to stealthily float through the corridors of freight. Each had activated floodlights on the upper left sides of their face shields where cones of light originated and bored holes deep into the darkness. The room was pitch black minus the eight unsteady cones.
“Got something over here, Captain,” Romavich, the flight assistant, said through their radio system. His light bent and cornered the containers where he saw that it was nothing but a shadow. Romavich looked back towards the others who moved through the air of the ship. “Never mind, I’m seeing things. My mind is playing games.”
“Not the first time.” Suk said and laughed.
“How about you shut your face, Mr. Suk,” she said.
“I’m a doctor.”
“Don’t mean anything out here,” Jax said. “Boyer and I got your doctor right here. Let me know when any of you see the freaks and I guarantee you will be just fine,” he said and showed them all the flamethrower he carried, holding it out to show them by its base.
The containers went high on both sides of the crew as they floated through the freight room one by one. Holland looked up and down, the crates towered in both directions as far as he could see with the cone of his light. There were no sounds and no lights in the storage room, nothing moved except for the crew and all appeared dead inside the ship. It was as if the world inside the Athena II had suddenly gone still and had yet to be reawakened. Perhaps the ship’s power sources had gone empty and the crew had been left to suffocate. It appeared that way but Holland didn’t think that was the whole truth. Something about the room just seemed off. He slowly glided through the dark aisle and avoided the metal railing of the catwalks as he did so, hurdling his body up and over metal pipes and braces. The captain put his light on the mechanical claw and the inner workings it held. It was impressive. It had seemed so small during their training on the screens and the many map layouts they had gone over but now that he saw the room with his own eyes, he marveled at the engineering and its magnificent scale. The enormity of the iron containers and the mechanical systems were unbelievable. Just by their sizes alone, he knew that the supplies held within the crates would have kept hundreds of people fed in deep space for decades if not hundreds of years. Unfortunately for the scientists aboard the Athena II, it seemed that they never had a chance to use the Confederacy’s supplies. The containers appeared to have never been touched.
“How the hell do hundreds of people working aboard a ship not use the food?” Boyer said.
“They never got the chance to,” Holland replied over the radio in the snakeskins. “Whatever happened to them, happened early on, maybe even in the first couple days. Once the Athena II reached V616, the Confederacy lost contact.”
The crew turned and twisted through the aisles of storage containers but the room remained empty of life. There were no signs of struggle, nor of any creatures, fantasy or not. In fact, Holland saw that there wasn’t much of anything to see in the storage room except for the huge crates and catwalks. But it wasn’t about just what he saw, he sensed that the room wasn’t completely empty. Holland felt that something was watching them, probing at them with its eyes, it was as if something was waiting for them to go deeper into the ship.
“Nothing’s here,” Boyer said while looking around the crates.
“Don’t let your guard down,” Jax said. “That’s when surprises happen. Just keep that little baby pointed into the darkness.” He indicated the other flamethrower held by Boyer and continued on.
The team came to the far side of the storage room where a mustard-yellow hatch stood out against the gray wall. It was marked with the words: TO GALLEY that appeared upside down to the search team. Above the hatch was an alphanumeric designation of 07A, indicating the corridor labelling system of the ship. A conveyor belt fed into the side of the opening through the wall, presumably to take supplies from the storage room directly into the galley where they would have been used to produce edible food for the crew of the Athena. Boyer and Jax shone their cones on the conveyor belt system where they saw that the gear system and chains were partially rusted over, oxidation.
“Iron oxide,” Romavich said. “Look there on the drive shaft to the side of the belt.” He pointed to the machine’s axle. Romavich and Dettman moved forward first and then the rest of the team followed behind.
Holland looked at the gear system of the conveyor belt as they approached, it was so old. “There must be moisture and oxygen in here, or had been. None of the other components show rust.” His voice crackled over the radio transmission of the snakeskins. He approached the door to the empty corridor, braced his feet so that they were planted to the sides of the door, and pulled it up and open. It was heavier than expected even without gravity as he worked hard against the locking apparatus. The hatch assist mechanism had been left unpowered due to the failed generators and the door was left closed, but even with that Holland thought it was strange. Eventually the hatch had opened though and so he let his thoughts drift on. The corridor, like the storage room, was completely dark and appeared to him as a long black tunnel into a silent beast. The lights of the crew drew long shadows down the passage’s walls against the siding of electrical conduits, mechanical piping systems, and metal grating.
Holland looked at Jax. “After you,” he said and smiled, pointing to the flamethrower.
“Yeah, my pleasure.”
INTERVIEW: PART IV
/declassified
/operation/action/event_horizon
/interrogations
end
Interviewer: During the trip did you ever get the sense that there was any animosity between the crew members of the ship?
2nd Officer S.Roberts: No, we were one happy little family, just like all the investors wanted us to be.
Interviewer: Certainly there were fights at times, maybe disagreements? Arguments over how to handle certain things? Eight years is a long time to travel with the same people.
2nd Officer S.Roberts: No, I mean to be honest I can’t think of any arguments we had with one another. We all knew our roles during the mission and that it wasn’t just our job on the line, but our lives. When you feel that kind of pressure you bond with one another.
5
The crew worked their way down the corridor until they arrived at the door leading into the galley. It was the first transition point between the UDS and the generator room of the ship, a midpoint of sorts where food was accessible to all sides of the ship. Jax opened the door into the kitchen and the crew pulled themselves into the galley of the Athena. Cooking utensils hovered in the empty space, butcher knives and saucer pans sparkled under the conical lights like strange beautiful, floating stars within a dark and dusty nebula. Empty, clear beer bottles glimmered and hung in the beams of lights that crisscrossed the room as they swam through. Holland looked at one of the bottles with thirsty eyes, it was dry, he missed it. The room’s preparation tables were constructed of manufactured stainless steel and were fastened together end to end, their legs were bolted to the floor tiles. Behind them were large pieces of mechanical cooking equipment and behind those were huge empty soup containers, meat slicing devices, and walk-in refrigerators.
“Does anybody pick up the smell of this place? It smells horrible, like rotting meat and spoiled milk,” Michaels said as he turned around to float out of the galley and
back into the corridor away from the others. He pushed a huge wooden rolling pin back into the kitchen where it swam and thudded against the far wall, it then bobbed back to the opposite side of the galley.
“I don’t get much of that,” Yola said. “The smell is alright to me.” The crew spread out into the galley and their lights shone through the floating haze of equipment and tables. On the other side of the kitchen would be a second hatch and small, laddered stairway that would lead to another corridor.
“Readings of moisture in the room are pretty minimal, sixteen percent above saturated liquid line. Low relative humidity, but humidity nonetheless,” Holland said as his snakeskin suit gave him readings by the heads up display (HUD) projected onto the shield in front of his face.
“Explains the rust on the drive shaft back there,” Yola said. She moved through the utensils and knives that floated above the food preparation tables which twisted and turned and she pushed them gently aside. Michaels came back into the room behind the rest of the team as Yola said, “I’m pretty hungry, how about you guys? I know Jax wouldn’t mind a burger, maybe a few. How about that?” She laughed at her own joke but no one else did.
Jax was quiet.
“Jax?” she asked.
He didn’t respond. She turned and saw his face through his snakeskin suit, it was calm and focused on something. “You see something, big boy?” she asked.
“Across the galley, in the corner of the room next to the mixer,” Jax said, his floodlight catching a figure floating in the dark, or what was left of it. The men and woman drifted through the ship’s kitchen room and approached the figure that floated angelically within the galley, just far enough for them not to be able to make sense of what they were seeing. As they neared, the shadowy figure became clear in their light.
“It’s a crew member,” Holland said.
“Yeah, that’s one of them, but they ain’t movin’,” Romavich replied.
The distance between the eight search team members of the Poseidon and the still corpse steadily grew shorter until the team had a clear view of the body. The man, or what was left of him, was dead. His limbs dismembered and floating nearby, almost appearing to them like they had been torn from his body. Blood was pasted across all of the surrounding walls. Holland felt like throwing up.
“What in the hell is this, Suk?” Jax asked. “That is not oxygen deprivation.”
“Poseidon, do you copy?” Holland asked, holding a switch on the radio box of the snakeskin down.
“Copy, Captain,” Roberts said over the radio system of the snakeskins.
“We need to get out of this can. Something’s out here, look at this guy,” Michaels whispered to himself.
“What we need to do is stay, locate any of the remaining crew, and get them back on the Poseidon,” Holland said.
“Everything okay out there?” Roberts asked.
“No response, no contact, no boarding. Remember? This was a bad move, Holland,” Yola said. “It’s not right.”
“Can we just get an ID on the body before our own heads fall off?” Holland said as he floated toward the figure, his gloved hand slipped off the table. The crew was hesitant. “Anybody want to help or am I the only one with a job to do?”
The team approached the body with caution and Holland turned a knob on the small box that hung from the left side of his belt. An LED began to pulse, signaling that his suit’s camera had been activated. Holland used the cone of light to illuminate the body and started to record.
Holland clicked his radio on, “Poseidon, respond, over.” No response. He tried again, “Roberts, you getting this on the CCD?”
“What is it?” the radio crackled within his helmet, cutting in and out of the static. The walls were thick and there was probable radio interference from the gravity of V616.
“We found our first crew member.”
“Good news,” she responded.
“In a few different places.”
“Oh.”
“I’m transmitting a feed to you so you can take a look. It’s not pretty, just a warning. We need an identification of which crew member this is. It’s possible that this may be more than one person.” He turned around and signaled to Suk, the Poseidon’s primary medical support member to take a look with him. The two approached the corpse.
Suk sailed to the body and spoke into the radio, “Suit’s off, nude, male, lower body missing, separated at the stomach, muscle tissue and organs exposed, frozen solid, extreme lacerations and contusions on side of face. Seems to be unidentifiable. It almost looks like something tore this guy up. Burn marks on hands and upper abdomen, fingernails of hands on limbs completely black, all of it looks fresh to me. But there’s not much bacteria out here to decompose the body, this likely happened years ago.” Suk shifted his glare to Holland, “We need to get out of here, Roy. I don’t like the feel of it, not after seeing this. I don’t like anything about it, something isn’t right. This guy didn’t die from lack of oxygen.”
Holland didn’t like the feeling either but they couldn’t just leave, they had known there were going to be problems on the Athena and the Confederacy hadn’t sent them all this way to just turn and run home with their tails between their legs. They would never accept it and besides this is what they had worked for, what he had sacrificed for. “We can’t leave,” he said to Suk, his suit shimmered as the light cone from Holland illuminated the snakeskin. The rest of the hall was black.
Yola shook her head and came forward, “Roy, you know me, I love the drama and all, but this isn’t what we trained for. We shouldn’t be here against our instruction. Maybe there is something on this ship that did this. Some type of, I don’t know, horror.”
“Horror? Now you sound like Jax,” his radio crackled again. “There is a reason for this, maybe there was an explosion on the ship and this one floated on in here. We need to get to the generators, check the power supply, just like our plan, right? We’ll see if the pumps and gravitational systems are working, just like protocol.”
“You sure about this one? Nothing about this is protocol,” Yola said.
“I know,” Holland said quietly to himself. Bringing two fingers up, he motioned for everyone to keep moving past the body onward to where they had mapped the power core’s location. He stopped Jax, “I need you to stay here with this guy, try to work with Roberts to get an ID on him. She’s at the station. Use your video transmission. All the data is in the CCD back on the Poseidon.”
Jax didn’t say anything and just stared at Holland, acknowledging the command. But the man looked at him with an emotion that Holland tried to ignore. It was contempt. In that moment Holland wondered if Jax had been having the same thoughts as he had, he thought the answer was yes. Could he feel it? Could he feel the presence here, the unpleasant obtrusive aura? Could he hear Mears too? Jax looked at Holland with deep eyes and the two men acknowledged something beyond words. It was something primal, something deep within their beings, something animalistic. He sensed that Jax didn’t trust him.
Holland turned away from the man with the flamethrower and signaled the rest of the crew to get going. At first they were hesitant but soon acknowledged the command and followed his lead. At least we can try to get it together again, Holland thought. Once the team reached the core of the ship, he would divide them up to search through the research and engine rooms just like mission briefing said they would do. Maybe if there was power, they could get the gravity turbine spinning and get the life support systems back online. They’d also need to check the pumps. To get all of it done safely and find the others, Holland needed their trust. He hoped that he had it.
***
Out here on this ship I can hear Mears. I can hear his voice in my thoughts. Come with me, Roy, come with me and I’ll reunite you with your parents. Don’t you want to be with your parents again, Roy? He asks me questions. Remember when your mother left? You can go back to her. Don’t you love them enough to see them again? What about your wife? She�
�s out here too, do you know that? She’s with me and I can bring you to her. All you have to do is leave it all behind, leave your little life and your little ship behind and join them with me. You gave me up, you can give them up too. Give everything you are afraid of to me, everything that hurts you, let me carry the burden for you. All I need you to do is to sacrifice this one little thing for me and we’ll be good. You can’t let anyone make it back to the Poseidon, Roy. They would be a danger to the rest of humanity. Human nature is fickle, I am not. I will always love you. Just give me all of your pain, all of your worries, and let the rest slide off your back. Don’t let them go back, Roy. They can’t be allowed to go back.
6
It had been five hours since the crew of the Poseidon had begun their search of the Athena II. Jax had stayed behind and the rest of the team had carried on. They approached the stairway and Holland saw that the walls narrowed so close together that the crew was forced to descend into the second mechanical corridor one by one. It all seemed to Holland to stretch on for miles and felt so unnatural, so different than he expected it would be. And time, time was also bent on the Athena, nothing felt right at all. Were the distortions due to the gravitational field of V616? Perhaps, but perhaps not. He felt time warping in such a significant way that he wondered if Roberts was aging at a different pace back on the Poseidon. Were they moving slower than before or were the halls just getting longer? It was impossible to tell. Objects took on new shapes to him, what he had known in training to be long appeared to be growing short and what was short grew long. Holland closed his eyes and opened them again, everything was back to normal. What was he seeing? He needed a drink. On the wall to their front was a large alphanumeric designation: 08A. It was the designation for the eighth corridor heading in the A direction to the center of the ship. Metal grates tiled the bottom of the passageway. There were still no signs of damage, no signs of an explosion or any type of violence aside from the body in the galley. It was just a long dark empty mechanical hallway but it still felt to Holland as if something was guiding them further within the ship.