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| "The Infestation" prompt image from Iron Age Media |
“Unidentified skiff, please respond.” It was the fourth time I had hailed them. I waited a few more seconds, and then I keyed my communicator off. It looked like the ship was dead, and my patrol just got a lot more interesting. I set my autopilot to approach for docking, and I walked over to the suit compartment near the airlock. I slipped out of my magnetic shoes and put on the pressure suit instead. The helmet went on with a turn and a crunchy click. I still needed to get those damn seals changed. With a flick of my fingers, the suit started its self-tests, and I stood still as the whole suit over-pressurized a little to test for leaks. It was hard to move when it was like this, anyway.
The readouts came back all green and the suit returned to normal pressurization. I went back to the pilot's seat. Both ships were just about aligned now, and I completed the docking procedure. There was a muffled clunk as the two airlocks met and connected, and my ship's computer started scanning the other ship's status--internal atmosphere, system status, whatever it could.
Almost everything came back red. No crew detected. Computer shut down. No operating systems. No fuel. The only thing that came back yellow was the internal atmosphere and temperature. It was cold, and the air was breathable, but there was no active ventilation, so whatever was in there was all there was going to be unless I got something running. Whatever. My suit worked, so what the hell did I care?
This was going to be a pain in the ass to salvage, probably not worth it, but I was being paid to check drifters like this just in case somebody was left alive on board. We've all seen the movies, where some barely-functional ship is carrying some poor sap and the local security patrol or some salvagers get there just in time. It rarely turns out that way this close to the frontier, let me tell you.
I took a deep breath. Time to go check it out.
I walked over to the airlock and opened my side of it. The ship wasn't powered, so until it was I would need to pry open any doors I found, including the airlock. I went back to my ship and grabbed a spreader and mounted it on the outer door of the airlock. It crunched open with quite a bit of resistance, but once it was open it stayed open. Next I opened the inner door. There was no rush of air in either direction--a fairly good sign.
The inside was dark. The harsh blue light from my helmet light cast weird shadows as I panned it around. I tried yelling, but I didn't hear any response. It didn't look good, but the boss would be pissed if I didn't do a full sweep.
Frost covered the metal and glass surfaces on the inside. I decided to head to the bridge first. At least I might be able to get something running from there. As I walked down the hallway, I heard a strange hissing noise coming from somewhere behind the walls. Probably a little gas leak, but it might matter what it was. I told my suit to run a diagnostic on the ship's atmosphere and after a few seconds everything came back normal. The on-suit mass spectrometer was not amazingly sensitive, but it should be able to pick up any possibly toxic levels of contamination.
I kept moving. Fortunately, the path to the bridge didn't have any more closed doors to deal with, so I wiped the frost off of the screen mounted to the captain's chair and looked for the power button. With the systems completely off, none of the touchscreens were registering anything, so I had to find an actual mechanical button or switch.
There was nothing on the sides of the chair, so I started looking up and down the walls. Ideally, the main restart switch would have a colorful sign pointing to it or something, but it was so damned dark and frosty in there that it was hard to see what color anything was. I rubbed my hand across the metal surfaces to wipe off the frost, but it was slow going. I made my way carefully around the bridge, starting at the wall near the doorway and making my way around, counter-clockwise. I heard that hissing again, faintly, as I searched the internal walls.
I finally found the button on the wall near a desk on the starboard side of the bridge. I guess it was the post for the ship's engineer? I pressed it, and I heard a low hum start up. The console at the engineering station lit up, and I watched the ship computer's boot sequence. It looked like it might actually work--all of the self-tests were coming back yellow or green. The lights blinked on, and they made an odd whining noise. I started to look at the results of the self-test. Mechanically, the ship was fine, as far as I could tell. There were a few parts that were a bit past their scheduled maintenance, but nothing crazy.
All of a sudden, there was a series of very loud pops. As fast as I could with magnetic boots and no gravity, I got down on the floor and covered my head with my arms, and when it was over, it was dark again.
Every. Single. Light. Had failed catastrophically. At the same time. What the hell, I thought. I didn't even think modern diodes could do that. However, the rest of the ship's systems seemed to be mostly all right. I could hear the ventilators working, and the temperature was rising, too. I used the engineer's console to check the reactor and the battery. Sure, the reactor was out of fuel, but the battery had enough power to run at these settings for a couple of hours. Should be plenty of time.
I tried to pull up the ship's log but there was nothing there. That was very strange. There should at least have been a record of computer messages up to the point that it got shut down, but it looked like every single log file had been wiped. I couldn't even find crew logs or audio recordings. It was unusual, but maybe there was a good reason for it? Data storage failure? That kind of thing was rare but did happen from time to time, especially if there were uncontrolled power surges or anything like that. The computer turning on and the self-test didn't suggest that there had been any catastrophic surges, but who knows?
Standing there and thinking about it wasn't going to do any good. It was time to explore the rest of the ship, unfortunately still in the dark. I left the bridge and checked the first room on the left, which was a lounge of some sort. There was a large window, still covered in frost, though starting to clear up as the interior warmed up. There were chairs, video screens, a shelf full of board games, and a 3D pong-box. No signs of the crew. I checked a trash container in the corner and it just had empty food and drink packets in it. The lounge was clean and there was no debris floating around or anything. Either these people were neat freaks or they had done some cleaning lately.
Across the hall was a conference room--chairs, a table, and a projector. Again, there was surprisingly little sign of human habitation there. There wasn't even any dust clinging to the surface of the table, like it had been recently wiped.
This was getting a little unsettling. The ship's model was a small pleasure yacht. Normally those kinds of ships are drowning in signs of human habitation. I decided to head further aft and check out the crew quarters. Maybe I would find something there.
I won't bother describing the first two rooms I checked, one a bedroom with nothing suspicious in it, and another a storage closet for food, drink, and toiletries. It was the third room, another bedroom. I opened the door and walked in, and suddenly I could tell something was wrong. When I passed my light over the walls, they looked really strange--smeared and dirty. I panned my light around, and that's when I saw him, or rather it, tucked into a corner of the room.
It was a corpse. My stomach tied itself into a knot as I realized that the dirty smear on the walls was blood. The man's body had had its throat cut, and that wasn't the worst part. In the little side bathroom were two more corpses, one, a woman, looked like it had been strangled with a necktie and the other, a child, had its little head bashed in. Everything was dried up, probably a couple of days old, but not long enough for the bodies to decompose too much. I was glad I didn't have to smell it.
My instinct was telling me to get the hell out of there. I backed out of the room and sealed the door. I had the urge to just go back to my ship and run for it, but I took a deep breath and knew that I had to make sure there wasn't someone still alive somewhere. I gave the rest of the quarters a quick once-over but there were no more bodies. It looked like a little family on a fun trip had suddenly decided to kill each other or themselves or something. The thing was, I imagine it's very hard to bash your own head in, or strangle yourself with a necktie, or cut your own throat. Even if I wanted to I doubted I could really do it. And I was supposed to believe that these three people either turned on each other and then the last survivor offed himself, or what?
Maybe a Picker? Someone boarded them and did all this? It seemed unlikely, as there were plenty of valuables still left in the quarters. I took another deep breath. There wasn't anything I could do for them now. Run this thing by the numbers. I would have to record the coordinates, set up a beacon, and have some real salvagers come out here and handle things.
There were two more rooms to check: engineering and one more at the end of the hallway. Engineering was all in good shape, as far as I could tell. I walked up and down the three aisles in the room and nothing was out of place. There was no sign that anyone had been tinkering inside any of the wall panels, no burn marks, no loose hardware. I walked out and to the last door at the end of the hallway. The door slid open with a whoosh and what greeted me was something I wasn't expecting. It wasn't terrifying as much as it was confusing.
Three perfectly good cryo pods sat inside the room.
It must have been Pickers, then, and something must have scared them off. I've seen suicide pacts before. Ships where something failed so badly and so quickly that the people inside decided a quick death was preferable to hypothermia, asphyxiation, thirst, whatever. It happens, mostly to those who treat space like a pleasure cruise on a habitable planet. Ships these days are comfortable, affordable, and convenient but they aren't magic. Shit happens.
But I've never seen a suicide pact on a ship where a full complement of cryo pods were available. Yes, you might float for weeks or even years, but your battery might last that long, as efficient as modern pods are. And even if you don't get picked up by a random patrol or from somebody picking up your beacon in a nearby system, dying from a cryo pod failure doesn't hurt--you don't suffer.
I didn't like any of this. I hadn't picked up any signs of Picker ships on approach, so I assume they were all long-gone, but now I really didn't want to be here any more. My ship would have told me if anything had popped up on the sensors, so I wasn't worried about that, either. I'm not easy to scare, at least I'd like to think so, but the way this didn't add up had the hairs on the back of my neck standing up.
I went back to the bridge and shut down all unnecessary systems. I shuddered. Nobody in here would be needing fresh air or heat. I set up the comm suite to put out a radio beacon every fifteen seconds, and left the computer running in a minimum-operational state. The power draw said that the battery would last for weeks, now. Plenty of time for me to get back and then for salvagers to come out and take care of things. Time to get the hell out of here and finish my patrol. I'd feel a lot more comfortable alone in my ship than cooped up with three unexplained corpses. There was that weird hissing noise again, but I wasn't going to spend any more time investigating it. I can write it in my report.
I was walking back to the airlock when I saw a weird sparkle on the wall from my helmet light. The ship was pretty warm by now, and the frost should have all melted, but wait a minute, that wasn't a glass or a metal surface, it was that cheap matte plastic on most of the internal walls, or at least it should have been. I passed my light over it again, and it reflected the light very strangely. Well, it's on the way to the airlock anyway, I thought, and I walked over.
Abruptly I nearly fell over--I lost my footing and struggled to stay balanced. One of my boots gripped a floor panel and the whole thing started to float away. I deactivated the magnetic hold on that boot and tried to regain my footing on a different panel instead. My legs sprawled out at an uncomfortable angle, and I tried to pull them under me. That effort led to me bending toward the oddly shiny bits on the wall, and I looked into the space the panel had been covering.
It was strange, like a... carpet made out of jade, maybe? It was reflective and it stretched into the little crawl space under the floor panels. Despite the bluish light from my helmet, I could somehow tell that the thing I was looking at was very green. I leaned in for a closer look, and I heard a noise, like rain, or maybe more like sleet bouncing off of a thin metal roof, a harsh rushing noise that hurt my ears and made my stomach twist.
The jade carpet moved. It rushed along the floorboards and lurched around my left leg. Suddenly my suit integrity monitors went from green to red. It had penetrated my suit, whatever the hell it was. I felt it crawling on the outside of my clothes and the rushing noise got louder, and now there was a nauseating squelch over it.
It spread over my body in seconds, and when it had, suddenly there was a pain all over me, like a thousand white-hot little pins had stuck into me all at once. I screamed and doubled over, and it brought my face closer to the shifting green stuff. At this distance, it looked like little roaches--little crawling green roaches. Then the hot pain from the needles changed to something else entirely. I felt like I was being cut up all over, that painful sting from a paper cut, too small to lose blood but enough to irritate nerves. Then I felt something I had never felt before... it was like when someone pinches the skin on your arm and pulls a little, but imagine that your skin pushes, too. No. Oh, no. The damned things were getting under my skin.
I struggled to breathe, I struggled to not scream, I struggled to stay conscious. My vision swam. Pain. Everything was fiery pain. And then, as suddenly as it had all happened, everything was all right.
Yes. everything is all right
all that was left was to get back onto my ship and return to the colony
yes the colony i just need to get back to the colony
time to go home yes there are people there who can help they can come back for the ship
this is important the rest of my patrol can wait
i need to go home
they are waiting
# # #
Thanks for reading! This story takes place (I think--did I break any rules?) in the universe of my Derelict Project series. I wonder if the hero of this story made it back to his home colony...
If you like space sci-fi with some mystery to it, check out Missed Contact! It's a cool story of a salvage team on a job to figure out what the hell happened to a team of scientists that vanished on a newly-discovered planet.
If you haven't figured it out yet, I like the motif of derelict spacecraft. Hmmm, if you liked this, you might like The PAEAN Project, too!
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