Orion Lost

by Alastair Chisholm

Beth stared at the hologram. It looked back. This is not a joke, she thought.

  Ship said, “Please designate your second-in-command.”

  Beth made it to the doorway. Sleeping Berth Five was across the corridor and to the left. She sniffed; there was a faint smell of something … ozone? Smoke?

  “Ship, is something burning?”

  “Yes. There is a fire in Generator Room Three.”

  “What?”

  Ship seemed completely relaxed. “There is a fire in Generator Room Three. Gizmos have been assigned. The fire is under control, however Generator Room Three cannot be accessed and all generators are locked into safety mode. Please designate your second-in-command.”

  Walk, thought Beth to her legs. Walk. She tottered out of the doorway, made it two metres across the corridor and grabbed the rail on the other side, feeling triumphant. Then she slowly made her way to Sleeping Berth Five.

  “What happened?” she asked, concentrating on her walking.

  “Please be more specific.”

  Beth snorted. “All this!” she said, waving. “What happened with the Jump? Why did it go wrong?”

  “There was an Event. Emergency Jump was initiated. Damage resulted from the Event and the Jump. The crew were placed into emergency Sleep.”

  “But what caused it?”

  “Ship systems were compromised during the Jump. Log entries have been lost.”

  Beth stopped. “You mean you can’t remember?”

  “Log entries have been lost.”

  She was at Berth Five now; her legs were starting to feel more like they belonged to her and she was able to stumble into the room without falling over. Her parents’ pods were near the front. Beth reached the first one, her dad’s, and peered inside.

  He was there, his chest rising and falling very slowly as he breathed. He seemed unharmed. Beth looked for a long time, and then went to her mum’s pod.

  “Why can’t you Wake them?” she asked. Her voice seemed steady, she thought.

  Ship said, “There was no time for proper Sleep operation. Emergency Sleep was carried out instead. This appears to have failed. The memory records for all crew members were corrupted.

  “Are they… Are they gone?”

  “The memory records were corrupted, but they can be repaired. This ship does not contain the necessary equipment to repair them. Repairs can be carried out on Earth or any major colony.”

  Relief pounded in on Beth so hard that she thought she was going to faint. They can be repaired.

  “OK,” she said. Her voice sounded oddly muffled, as if far away. “What happens now?”

  “Please designate your second-in-command.”

  She laughed. “Ship, I’m not the captain! I can’t be! I’m only thirteen! I’m a kid!”

  “You are the most senior available crew member with Command Training. My programming states that in the event of there being a crew member with acceptable Command Training, that crew member must assume command. You must assume command.”

  Beth stared at the hologram, and it stared back. It seemed completely serious. You must assume command.

  This is a glitch, she thought. It’s just a glitch. I’ll be ‘captain’, but Ship will keep things actually running, and when we get home, we … we fix Mum and Dad. This is fine.

  “OK,” she said slowly. “Let’s pretend I’m the captain.” She shook her head but continued. “What happens now?”

  “Please designate your second-in-command.”

  “Lauryn,” she said. “Lauryn Hopper.”

  “Lauryn Hopper does not have sufficient Command scores and cannot be selected as second-in-command.”

  Beth blinked. “I thought I was captain? Don’t I get to choose?”

  “Lauryn Hopper does not have sufficient Command scores and cannot be selected as second-in-command.”

  “OK… Mikkel Eklund.”

  “Mikkel Eklund does not have sufficient Command scores and cannot be selected as second-in-command.”

  “Well, who can I pick, then?”

  “Available crew members with acceptable Command scores include: Vihaan Joshi.”

  Beth waited. Eventually she said, “That’s it?”

  “Please designate your second-in-command.”

  “Wow, what a list.” Beth closed her eyes for a second, and then grinned as she imagined the look on Vihaan’s face when he discovered who his captain was…

  “OK,” she said. “Fine. Ship, I designate Vihaan Joshi as my second-in-command. Let’s Wake him up and give him the good news.”

  With a final pat on the lid of her mum’s pod, Beth made her way back to the kids’ berth. Her body was mostly working now, although she had to be careful; it was like walking with pins and needles.

  Ship was already waking Vihaan up. By the time Beth made it back, his pod was open and his breathing had returned to normal.

  “Vihaan,” said Ship.

  Vihaan’s eyes opened. He looked up at the hologram without moving.

  “Vihaan Joshi, you are awake. You will start to regain control over your body soon.”

  His eyes flicked to Beth and stared at her. She returned his gaze, surprisingly nervous. After a second, he looked back at Ship. He moved his jaw back and forward a little as if stretching. “Dad,” he whispered.

  “Vihaan, you must listen carefully to what I am about to tell you,” said the avatar. “There has been an accident.”

  Vihaan lay quiet as Ship repeated the words it had said to her, and didn’t react until he heard “All crew members not in sleep pods were compromised.” Then he blinked. “Dad,” he said again.

  Ship said, “Your father is safe but cannot be Woken. Command has reverted to the highest-ranking available crew member. Beth McKay is acting captain.”

  Vihaan stared at the hologram, blinked several times and then croaked, “Her?” Even half paralysed, the astonished contempt in his voice was enough to make blood rush to Beth’s cheeks.

  “That’s sir, actually,” she snapped. “Or captain, if you prefer.”

  Vihaan stretched his mouth again and his hands twitched. Beth could see him willing them into action, fingers moving one after the other on his right hand, then his left, waking up and taking control. How does he do that? she wondered.

  “What happened?” he asked. His voice sounded almost normal already.

  “Ship doesn’t know. It lost its memories. We Jumped, and when I Woke we were like this.”

  He pulled himself up into a sitting position and started wiggling his toes methodically. His face looked calm, but he seemed to be thinking hard.

  “Where is my father?” he said at last. He asked it in a deliberately off-hand way, as if only curious. Beth could tell that he was worried and didn’t want her to know.

  “He’s next door. I’ll show you when you can move.”

  “I can move now,” he said, and hoisted himself out of the pod with a sudden push. He landed awkwardly but didn’t fall, and his feet stayed under him. He held tight to the pod for a moment and then shuffled away. Beth tried to help him, but he stopped until she backed off.

  He stumbled towards the adults’ berth. When he got to the corridor, she was sure he would reach out an arm to her, but he didn’t; he closed his eyes for a second, muttered something under his breath and lunged across the room in two tottering steps, grabbing the handrail with a grunt. Then he continued as if she wasn’t there.

  They reached Berth Five and she showed him Captain Joshi’s pod. Vihaan looked in.

  “Is he all right?” he asked softly. “Can he be … fixed?”

  “Ship thinks so. It says we just need to get to a colony, or to Earth.” Vihaan nodded and ducked his head for a second. When he looked up his face was calm.

  “Very well,” he said. “And you are … captain, now.” She sensed again his bemusement but before she could answer he called out, “Ship? Where is the nearest colony?”

  “The nearest colony is on Mina Three, approximately seven light y
ears from here.”

  “Can we Jump there?”

  “Jump drive is offline. Jump navigation is offline.”

  “Can we repair it?”

  “There are no crew members who can be revived and who have sufficient expertise to repair Jump.”

  “Very well,” said Vihaan, appearing unfazed. “Send a message shuttle with our location to—”

  “There are no message shuttles remaining.”

  Vihaan frowned. “Where did they go?”

  Ship seemed to think about this. Not long; a half-second perhaps. But noticeable. Then it said, “Many systems were damaged in the Event. Log entries have been lost.”

  “Could we send a radio signal?” asked Beth. “I mean, if it’s quite close—”

  Vihaan gave her a scornful look. Ship said, “A radio signal travelling at the speed of light would take seven years, six months and three days to reach Mina Three, and would be very weak on arrival. It is unlikely to be picked up.”

  “If it gets picked up at all,” added Vihaan, “it will be by nearby Scrapers.”

  Beth felt embarrassed but tried not to show it. “OK, OK, bad idea. But what about—”

  “Ship,” interrupted Vihaan, ignoring her, “status report.”

  “The ship is damaged but structurally intact. Generators are in safety mode. Propulsion is offline. Jump drive is offline. Jump navigation is offline. Oxygen generation is damaged but functioning. Gravity is online. Internal sensors are damaged. External sensors are damaged. Batteries are running at sixty-eight per cent. Estimated time to failure: six hours thirty-nine minutes. There is a fire in Generator Room Three.”

  “What?”

  “Yes,” said Beth, “but it’s OK, Ship says it’s under control—”

  A crash rumbled up the corridors from the rear of the ship and they stumbled.

  “ATTENTION. ATTENTION. FIRE IN GENERATOR ROOM TWO. ATTENTION. ATTENTION. FIRE IN GENERATOR ROOM THREE.”

  Klaxons broke out across the ship and there was a sound, far away, of emergency doors slamming shut.

  “Correction,” said Ship. “The fire is no longer under control.”

  11

  Fire

  Vihaan spun to face Beth. “What have you done?” he spat. “Ship! Status of fire!”

  Ship appeared as calm as ever. “The fire has spread to Generator Room Two. All generators are now offline. Emergency measures in place. The fire is no longer under control. Gizmos have been damaged. Remaining Gizmos are insufficient to control the fire. Short circuits in Generator Room Two. Explosion in Generator Room Two. Batteries damaged. Time to battery failure: eighteen minutes.”

  Vihaan half ran down the corridor, still groggy but almost recovered. Beth staggered after him. “Where are you going?” she panted.

  “To the generators, of course! Ship! Options!”

  Ship’s hologram followed them as they stumbled along. “Options include: evacuate ship; detach generator module.”

  “Show me the fire!”

  “Camera systems in generator rooms are offline.”

  Vihaan muttered a word under his breath and sped up. Beth still felt as if her legs were on puppet strings.

  “How long has it been burning?” he demanded.

  “I … don’t know,” said Beth. “Since I woke up. Twenty minutes?”

  “And you didn’t think to put it out?”

  “Ship said it was under control!” she snapped. “And I was distracted! It kept asking me to designate a second-in-command!”

  Vihaan grunted, accelerated and left Beth behind. She swore and forced her legs to move properly. Left-right-left-right, come on, come on, left-right-left—

  “Caution,” said Ship. “Gravity systems have been reduced to preserve battery life.”

  Beth’s feet weren’t hitting the floor properly. Each step launched her further than she expected, and it was hard to maintain balance. Her stomach churned.

  “Oh no,” she muttered, clinging to the handrail.

  The corridor ended in a door marked with yellow and black stripes and a sign that read “GENERATOR ROOMS – Engineer Personnel Only”. Beth hurried through, into an unfamiliar area with a further four doors; the door to Generator Room Two was open and she stumbled through it. The walls were hot to the touch and the smell here was stronger, a sharpness in the air that made her lungs hurt.

  She lurched round the corner and nearly collided with Vihaan. He was peering through a thick super-glass inspection window. She didn’t even need to look through it herself; she saw the flames reflected on his face. She looked anyway.

  There wasn’t just a fire burning in the room – the room was the fire. The massive steel generator was burning. The cross braces were burning. The floor was burning and the paint was burning off the walls. It was almost too bright to look at. And it roared; she could feel it through the insulation, through the glass, raging. With gravity almost gone the fire wasn’t burning upwards, but spread around, floating, balls of blueish red plasma impossible to control.

  A white cloud of gas was spraying from sprinklers in the ceiling, but it seemed far too thin to stop the fire. Below, six Gizmo robots directed jets of more spray. They looked tiny. One wall of the room was completely wrecked, and through it she saw the remains of Generator Room Three.

  Vihaan said, “Can we detach just these two generator modules?” Somehow he still sounded calm.

  “No,” said Ship. “Modules are too badly damaged. Time to battery failure: sixteen minutes.”

  “Why isn’t the spray putting it out?” panted Beth.

  “Supplies of halon gas are very low. Sprays cannot maintain pressure.”

  “Can we use water?”

  “Spraying water will cause both electrical and chemical explosions.”

  “OK, OK … something else then. What else puts out fire?”

  Vihaan shook his head. “It is not enough,” he said. “It is not enough.”

  He was right. Even as she watched, a beam buckled and crushed one of the Gizmos, and the fire ballooned out. The noise seemed louder.

  “We have to detach all the generator modules!” she shouted.

  “And then what?” demanded Vihaan. “We’ll still be out of batteries! We’ll have no power! We’ll freeze to death!”

  We could burn the generators to keep warm, thought Beth hysterically. Come on. Think. Think. Detach the generators or die. Detach the generators and die. Evacuate, fire themselves into the vacuum of space in tiny escape craft … and die. What puts out a fire like this? Nothing. Nothing on Earth. Nothing…

  “Ship!” she shouted. “Open both airlock access doors to Generator Room Two!”

  Vihaan gaped at her. “You want to go in?” he roared. The noise was so loud now she could barely hear him.

  “Vacuum!” she shouted. “Vacuum!”

  She saw his face change as he understood. The external access doors were an airlock, but if they opened both the outer and inner doors … the room would be exposed to the vacuum of space.

  Next to her, Ship said, “Opening both airlock doors will cause massive atmospheric decompression. In their current state, Generator Rooms Two and Three could lose structural containment. Please confirm your—”

  “Yes! Just do it! Confirmed!”

  “Confirmed.”

  Through the glass she saw the external hatch open. There was a … shudder, and as the inner and outer doors opened, it was as if a wind swept through the room. Everything, suddenly, was leaning towards the hatch: the fire, the equipment, the Gizmos, all pulled towards the vacuum of space.

  The Gizmos! But they’d already stopped trying to fight the fire and were now clamping on to nearby fixtures. There was a noise, a low whistle, that steadily rose in pitch and grew louder until she wanted to hold her hands over her ears. It filled the room and cut into her head; it was the sound of everything being sucked out through the hatch. As the flames leaned towards the exit they stretched and pulled and for a moment they seemed even worse than befo
re.

  Small pieces of wreckage trembled and danced towards the hatch before lifting and flying out, crashing against the walls as they did so. Now the flames were stretched so thin they became insubstantial, invisible; then they started to die out.

  “It’s working!” she shouted.

  Generator Room Two slowly emptied. Spanners, hammers and other smaller items spun through the air. Desks and chairs crashed into still larger pieces and kicked them up towards the hatch. They jammed together at the exit and Beth thought they were going to block it, but they burst through.

  The generator in the centre of the room stayed fastened to the floor, though it shook. Room Two was almost empty now, and the flames were nearly out. Through the blasted wall Beth could see the fire still burning in Room Three, but weakened.

  She turned to Vihaan, triumphant. “It’s working!” she shouted again. But he was scowling at the exit hatch.

  “The hatch has been damaged,” he said. “I do not know if it can be closed.”

  “So what? We can leave the whole area exposed if we have to. It’s not like we need to get to these rooms. We’ve got the other two generators—”

  A faint crash from within caught her attention; one of the Gizmos in Room Three had lost its grip and hurtled into the remains of the generator there, smacking straight into it. There was a rumble beneath her feet and a wrenching sound, and the generator broke free of its bearings … and drifted across the room.

  It moved quite slowly at first, but accelerating. And it was so massive that it seemed inevitable at any speed, a colossus of red-hot metal pushing or destroying anything in its path: fixtures, clutter, one of the other Gizmos… It crumped through the remains of the shattered wall.

  “Oh no,” she had time to say, before it slammed into Generator Two.

  There was very little atmosphere left in the rooms now, and the collision was surprisingly quiet. But she felt it through her feet on the deck, through the glass she was leaning against. It was a feeling like a vast paper model being scrunched up. It felt … big.

  Equipment scattered off both generators, and Generator Three itself bounced and hurtled off at an angle. She watched it. It looked like it was heading for them.