by David Wiley
CHAPTER 8
"Proceed with the scan, Ernie," Boris ordered.
"Scanning now, sir," Ernie punched in a set of commands for the Arkhangel's sensors.
"Looks promising," Horst commented.
"That it does," Boris agreed. "That indeed it does."
"Preliminary readings coming in now, Captain," Ernie announced. None of the crew had left the bridge during the several hours it took to scan and the tension was thicker than the lies of some old-timer spacerats in a dockside bar. "Looks like an F0 or maybe an A9 star, blue-white, just over 1.4 solar masses. So, it's bigger and hotter than Sol.
"I need more time to confirm any planets, but the system does have the equivalent of a Kuiper Belt I got from doing a digital sky survey. It helps that this end of the wormhole is actually closer to the elliptic than back home, but further out from the sun."
"How far to the belt to refuel?" Boris asked.
"About three days," Solo jumped in. "If we double our acceleration to 0.4 G, which, we should do now that we've confirmed a belt."
Qing frowned at his trampling on the Captain's authority, but Boris just nodded. "Go ahead and do it."
Two days later, Ernie had an update and a splitting headache. "The system has at least five planets, probably more, but I can't tell for sure with our sensors. Two of the planets are potentially in the habitable zone, where there could be liquid water. One of the two appears slightly smaller than Earth and the other is a super-Earth, about five times the mass, at least that's what the occultation seems to indicate."
"The what?" Horst asked.
"Occultation. Passing in front of a light source. One of the innermost planets actually passed in front of the sun." Ernie massaged her temples.
"Grab some shuteye," Boris said.
"I can manage, Captain."
"If you are going to call me 'Captain,' then consider that an order. You have not had more than a couple of hours sleep since we got here," Boris gently pried her out of her chair and pushed her towards the hatch. "Go."
"Uh, something interesting here," Solo leaned back so Horst could see the sensor monitor.
"What? We within range of some snowballs?"
"Not quite. This is something else entirely."
Horst leaned over and studied the monitor. "I'll say." He pondered, before belatedly calling the Captain over. "Hey, Boris, you ought to take a look at this."
Everyone once again crowded onto the bridge. "A distress signal?" Qing asked. She had been the last to arrive, making her way up from Engineering at the stern. How could she climb all those rungs at her age and not even be breathing hard? Boris shook his head and resolved to start exercising, sometime after this trip.
"Yes. From the DaLong," Solo answered.
"So, have they responded to our hail?" Ernie asked.
"We haven't hailed them, yet," Solo finally admitted.
"What? We have to let them know we're here," Ernie moved towards the comm station, only to find it blocked by Horst. She looked at Boris. "Captain?"
"We need to think this through, Ernie."
"How long has it been since they disappeared? If we're lucky they're all dead by now," Solo said.
"What?" Qing exclaimed.
"Or we could just claim we never heard it," Horst pointed out.
Boris nodded slowly. "That might work."
"It will not 'work!'" The objection came, surprisingly, from Sean. "You do not ignore a distress call. You just don't. I can't believe you two are even considering this!"
"We'd have to split the finder's fee at a minimum. Maybe lose the whole thing to the DaLong if they've documented their claim. It's first come, first served," Solo pointed out.
"Boris Stepanovich! I can't believe you're even considering this. It's Philippe Laviolette's ship. He's supposed to be your friend!" Qing was trembling with anger.
"I won't stand for this. If we don't help them, I'll tell the admiralty judge exactly what happened here." Ernie's voice was as cold as the icy fragments they were closing in on.
"As will I," Qing took a step closer to the girl.
"I'll take a piece of that action," Sean sided with them.
Six hours closer and still no response to Arkhangel's hails. The DaLong appeared to be outbound in an elliptical orbit, currently traversing the outer part of the system's Kuiper Belt. "They're dead," Solo announced with finality. "It's just wasted effort on our part."
"We agreed to attempt a rendezvous," Boris said. "The sooner you bring us alongside, the sooner we can confirm and be on our way."
"Looks like she's taken some damage," Qing commented, looking at the DaLong's magnified image on the screen.
"Probably from colliding with a KBO or two," Sean agreed. "Might have damaged their communication array."
"Might have," Boris did not sound convinced.
About an hour later, Sean reported from the hatch. "Docking tube extended. Bring us forward about ten meters and up two, Solo. Almost there. Good. Close enough."
Boris waited in his EVA suit inside the airlock, along with Ernie. He had agonized over the best combination to send onto the DaLong and then finally just asked for volunteers. Sean had stepped forward immediately. Boris was not surprised when Ernie was the other volunteer, but he was surprised at her comment as they were suiting up. "Don't worry. I think Horst and Solo will behave themselves while we're gone."
Boris nodded, then settled his helmet into place. "Okay, let's get this over with," he said over the comm circuit. They evacuated the atmosphere in the Arkhangel's airlock and then opened the outer hatch and floated across less than ten meters to join Sean at DaLong's main cargo hatch. They did not want to physically dock until they determined it was safe to do so.
Sean rotated the wheel to manually undog the large outer hatch. The three of them crowded into the airlock. Like its dragon namesake, the DaLong was a big beast, with a crew of a dozen and the airlock was sized accordingly. Even so, in their bulky suits they still managed to bang into each other while closing the outer hatch.
"Readouts show 0.9 atmospheres in DaLong," Sean reported. "Still probably want to stay fully suited."
Ernie tried to nod in her helmet. "You got that right. We have no idea what might be in there. It could be-"
"Ernie," Boris cleared his throat.
"Sorry, Captain."
"Crack her open, Sean," Boris ordered.
Sean palmed the pressure plate to open the inner hatch. Nothing happened. He tried it a second time.
"Something seems to be wrong," Ernie said.
"No shit!" Sean retorted. He grabbed the manual wheel and awkwardly started cranking with his gloved hands. "If I have to do this at every hatch, I want bonus pay." After a few minutes of grunting effort, the hatch yielded.
Lit by the lights mounted on either side of their helmets, the cargo hold beyond was hazy with the dust and small particles you always got in zero-G, but everything seemed to be in order. Ernie ducked in front of Sean, grabbed the next wheel with her gloved hands, and started to crank the hatch open.
The hatch opened to the central core of the ship. The DaLong was large enough to have a lift installed in the core. Unfortunately, it was not running. Instead the core stretched in either direction, fore or aft, emergency lighting LEDs flickering their sickly yellow glow. "Looks like the lift is stuck at the top of the shaft," Ernie pulled her head back. "At least we can float instead of climb since we haven't got any gravity. Fore or aft, Captain?"
"You and I will go fore to the bridge. Sean, you head aft and check out the engine room. You reading us okay, Arkhangel?"
"We can hear you just fine," Qing responded. "The picture is a little fuzzy, but it'll do."
"Okay, then." Boris kicked off along the shaft, followed by Ernie. Since the ship's engines were off, there was no gravity to slow them down. However, inertia was still a bitch if you were not careful, especially since the ship had just enough rotation about
its axis to cause you to miss a handhold.
They found the first body in the lift. "Must have gotten stuck in it when the ship's systems failed," Boris muttered.
Ernie shook her head, not realizing that it was barely noticeable in her helmet. Boris bet she had not been on more than a handful of EVAs. "I don't think so," she transmitted. "The lift door is stuck wide open and look how he's fallen, his head pointing into the lift. Why would anybody head into a stalled lift?"
Boris regarded her. "Very good question."
Ernie's voice sounded odd. "Sorry, I just start chattering when I get nervous."
Boris turned the figure over. There was a large soiled patch underneath the man's head, probably dried vomit, and several clumps of hair floated off his scalp. "Must have been out here a long time," Ernie said. "He isn't, uh, your friend, is he?"
Boris shook his head, in his unease making the same mistake as Ernie. "Doesn't look like a very pleasant way to die," Horst observed over the commlink from the Arkhangel.
"What do you think it was?" asked Qing.
"A pathogen of some type, maybe," Solo suggested.
"Doesn't make sense," Horst chimed in. "A pathogen wouldn't have affected ship's hardware and shut everything down."
"Captain? Sean here. I've got a couple of bodies here in engineering. The woman looks like she upchucked so hard she ripped something inside, at least there is blood all around her mouth and smeared across her hands. The guy looks like, well, best I can determine, he was trying to unfasten the shielding from the engine core."
"Must have been going nuts," Qing muttered over the circuit.
"Odd thing is, clumps of hair all over the place. Looks like both of 'em got a bad case of mange."
Ernie stepped over another body and entered the darkened bridge. "There are another three bodies here. There's a woman in the doorway, and two guys on the bridge. All with hair loss. One of the guys seems to have removed most of his clothing. Looks like he ripped it off. Then he crawled under the sensor station and puked his guts out. It's-it's awful." She turned to the Captain. "What the hell happened?"
Boris did not answer. He was crouched down next to a bulkhead, where the body of the other male had drifted in the weightlessness. The Captain's twin headlamps played over Philippe Laviolette's twisted face. Ernie came over and knelt beside Boris. "Is that him?" Boris mutely hugged the body to his chest.
"I'm sorry, Captain." Ernie said, then awkwardly pushed to her feet. The knee joints in the spacesuits definitely worked better going down than coming up, even in weightlessness. She gave the Captain some space and reported back.
"The telltales at all of the stations, communications, sensors, helm, they're all off. Only a few of the emergency LEDs are still showing." She punched the reset button on each station in turn, awkward with the suit's gloves. "Nothing is rebooting. Whatever hit them, hit them hard enough to knock out all of the electrical systems."
"Sean? Is the engine completely offline?" Qing broke in.
"Completely. Looks like it's been off for a long time. How long has the ship been missing? A couple of years? But these guys down here look better than I thought they would."
"What? Mummified?" Solo asked.
"No, the humidity is below normal, but still at about 40 percent," Ernie said. "Shouldn't these bodies be decomposed?"
"You'd think so, even in a spacecraft. Unless they instantly froze, but then all those, uh, bodily fluids would not have leaked," the Captain stood up. "Something about this is wrong. Really wrong."
"Sean?"
"Yeah, Qing?"
"Any sign of a battery pack down there in engineering? I'm thinking if we can find one that wasn't fried by whatever happened and hook it up to one of the bridge stations we may be able to get at the ship's log and figure out what happened."
"Shoulda thought of that myself. I think I saw one over by the workbenches," Sean replied.
"Good idea, Qing. Sorry I, well, it's Philippe." Boris held up a short linked chain with a coin-sized disk. It was Philippe's MID tag, containing his medical and identification data. Boris wore a similar one, as did the rest of the Arkhangel's crew and any other wildcatter. Boris regarded Philippe's tag somberly. "Poor son-of-a-bitch died while owing me money. Ernie, can you grab the tag from the body under the sensor station? Then let's check the rest of the ship while Sean hooks up the battery pack."
"What do you make of this, Captain?" Ernie asked. She stood in the doorway to the DaLong's tiny sickbay. Between the two of them and Sean, they had collected eleven tags. The twelfth and last was on the body strapped in the sickbay's lone bed. The corpse had an IV roughly jammed into her right arm, the needle bent. Several other bags floated gently around the room.
Boris grabbed one of the bags as it floated past in the air currents caused by the Ernie's movements. Red blood cells, Type A. Something nagged at him, a certain pattern lurking just out of reach. Ernie had crossed to the figure. "Blood transfusions? Why would she-"
The pattern clicked. "Damn! It's radiation poisoning."
"What? How? The engines?" Solo bleated over the comm.
"No, the engines hadn't blown," Sean answered from the bridge. "And it didn't look like they had gotten the shielding off the engine core. Qing? Could radiation have leaked from-"
Qing's voice was firm. "No. Shouldn't have harmed anyone in the engine room, let alone the rest of the ship. It-"
"The star," Ernie breathed.
"The star?" Horst demanded.
"The star?" Boris echoed.
"The star. It's a blue-white. Hotter and bigger than Sol. Puts out more radiation. Maybe there was a solar flare or something. Caught them unawares."
There was an uncomfortable silence. "I mean, it's just an idea," Ernie added.
"That would explain the fried electronics," Qing said.
"And the symptoms, nausea, hair loss, even the blood transfusion attempt," Boris nodded towards the corpse. "She was probably their medical officer. Figured out what was happening, but it was too late."
"The DaLong wouldn't have much shielding, none of us do. Some metal bulkheads, water tanks, and we generate small magnetic shields for each of our modules with rechargeable cells. We're designed to operate out in the Kuiper, after all, well away from the sun. A large flare from a hot star though..." Qing mused. "Radiation could also explain the lack of decomposition, if it killed off all the bacteria. Uh, Boris?"
Boris snorted. "I know, we need to get the hell off this death trap. Sean? Any success in hooking up one of the bridge stations to the battery pack?"
"Not yet. Everything is still flatlined."
"Drop it. We need to evacuate. Ernie, grab that last tag."
"Already done."
"Solo? I want you to plot a course to harvest some of those nearby snowballs as soon as we are back on board. Our hydrocarbons are awfully low and I want to get out of here as fast as we can. Just keep our bow pointed-"
"Away from the star. Got it. I'll try and keep the amidships water tank between us and it in case it's still blasting out radiation."
Back on board the Arkhangel, as they went through a thorough decontamination from the nozzles in the airlock, Boris spoke up. "Ernie, just how did you figure out about the radiation and the star?"
Ernie shrugged, not easy in a spacesuit. "Well, there was this episode of 'Space Patrol: Arcturus' that had-"
Boris' groan was clearly audible across the commlink. "Auuggh! Just once I wish we were not reliant on a plot from a holovid to solve our problems for us!"