Chapter 11 - 15 Hours Inside

They had drifted to the back of the line as the crew slowly made progress toward the bridge.

“You should have told us earlier,” First Mate Bouchard said to the small Kelar floating alongside her. “If we had known, we’d all be sitting on a beach somewhere now, sipping drinks in the sun instead of being trapped in this dark hell.”

Plav-tor-fel-mak bristled at the accusation. He had observed her behavior toward the two Kelar crew members throughout the expedition. The sting of being overlooked when she assigned tasks at the barricade earlier still lingered in his mind.

“How could I have known?” he replied, angry at once again being singled out. She probably just doesn’t like Kelar, he thought, despite knowing deep down it wasn’t true. Yet Plav-tor-fel-mak felt the crew had always snickered behind his back, mocking his keen eye for detail and his appreciation of beauty.

“Maybe you did know and just didn’t tell us,” Bouchard said. She knew the accusation wasn’t true. She just didn’t care.

“Perhaps you just wanted all the gold for yourself,” she concluded, savoring the power of putting the little lizard in his place. The deeper they ventured into the wreck, the more her control over the situation had slipped away. But now, she had discovered a way to reclaim some of that power, even if only for a fleeting moment.

Bouchard had never had any problems with the Kelar ground sample specialist or any of her Kelar crew members, for that matter. She had always appreciated their eye for beauty in the finer things in life. But now, in the oppressive shadows of the ship, she was starting to see them in a different light, their dark eyes betraying thoughts she could not fully comprehend. Thinking back on the events of the past day, she couldn’t really see how they had contributed to the expedition in any meaningful way. At the barricade earlier, Plav-tor-fel-mak hadn’t helped at all—he had just stayed out of the way, letting the Terran crew do all the hard work.

“I don’t know what—” she started to say, but Plav-tor-fel-mak would never learn the end of the sentence, as the first mate’s voice through the radio was replaced with a sickly gurgling sound that filled him with dread. In that moment, the terrors of the night had returned to claim their prize.

It all happened so fast. From the shadows of an adjacent room, something had struck Bouchard. All Plav-tor-fel-mak had time to see was that it was tall, thin, and white, but beyond that, it was all a blur. With a single stroke, it had severed First Mate Bouchard in two, her head and torso now drifting away from her legs in the weightlessness of the wreck, blood bubbling from her waist as it simultaneously boiled and froze in the cold vacuum of the ship.

Drifting three meters in front of them, Murray and Est-mar-kort had not noticed the attack. Plav-tor-fel-mak and Bouchard had been on their interpersonal comm circuit, and the darkness of the corridor and the isolating vacuum of space had shielded their teammates from the sounds and sights of the horrific spectacle that had occurred only meters behind their backs.

Frantically, Plav-tor-fel-mak switched his radio to group comm, screaming into the dark void for his two crewmates to help. In his panicked state, it seemed as if they rotated in slow motion, limited as they were by their maneuvering thrusters. When they finally completed their turn, he could see the look of pure terror on their faces as they watched the two halves of their first mate drift apart in the pale beams of their flashlights, eventually disappearing into the shadows of the dead ship.

Their screams made him wish the comm system had a mute mode. For safety reasons, it did not—it operated either on group or interpersonal mode, the latter automatically switching targets based on proximity.

“Hurry! We need to get out of here!” he shouted at his teammates.

Once again, turning around became a slow, laborious task, their urgent desire to distance themselves from the scene sharply contrasting with the constraints of moving in microgravity. Grabbing the shoulder of Est-mar-kort, he pushed her forward, trying to speed up their escape, but he miscalculated the physics involved, and she started to spin in the tunnel, the conservation of momentum sending him into a somersault in the process.

It took the three crew members several frantic minutes to stabilize themselves again, minutes overshadowed by the omnipresent fear of another imminent attack. They felt as if the eyes of their unseen enemy were peering out at them from the darkness beyond their vision, coldly calculating its next move. Yet nothing happened to them while they regained their composure.

As they finally started to drift away from the place where First Mate Bouchard had been killed, into the dark tunnel ahead of them, Plav-tor-fel-mak had only a single, dreadful thought in his head.

He could not help but wonder if the alien corpse they had seen floating in the room they had previously passed was still there.

Thirty minutes later, still reeling from the sight of Bouchard’s body split in two, her intestines slowly spilling out from her waist in a macabre, weightless dance of death, the three remaining crew members reached a collection of rooms organized in a circle, like spokes on a wheel around a central plaza.

Describing it as a plaza might have been using the wrong word, Plav-tor-fel-mak thought grimly. The word brought with it connotations of large, open spaces filled with glorious sunlight. This place was nothing like that. It was dark and cramped, gray and decayed, its myriad wall panels on the verge of falling off—just like every other room on the ship. A rotunda of death, with satellite rooms hovering like round vultures around it, ready to pounce.

Not many words had been spoken between them since they had lost Bouchard. The silence and monotony of the trek hung over them like a mountain, unrelenting and suffocating in its weight. Despite their journey bringing them closer and closer to their goal—the bridge of the alien ship—the approaching end brought no joy as they slowly floated down the corridors of the wreck.

“Est-mar-kort,” Murray said suddenly, her high-pitched voice breaking the silence. Plav-tor-fel-mak welcomed the intrusion, as it distracted him from his increasingly gloomy thoughts.

“I need a new oxygen canister,” Murray continued. “I have maybe ten minutes left in this one.”

The silence that followed rendered the past half-hour of quiet hiking a deafening cacophony by comparison.

Eventually, Est-mar-kort answered. “There is no more oxygen,” she said, her voice weak and uncertain. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to do,” she added as an apology. Given the grave news she had just delivered to her companion, her words seemed utterly insignificant.

Murray didn’t reply, but the other two team members could hear, from the sound of her breathing, how fear and panic took hold of their teammate.

It was an impossible situation, yet also one they had known for hours they would eventually face. Long before even learning of the disaster, they had been doomed ever since Peretti's Legacy was first damaged. For the past day, the crew had, for all practical purposes, been dead women and men walking.

“I don’t want to die,” Murray sniffled. “Promise to tell my family what happened to me, if you reach the bridge,” she asked.

“Of course,” Plav-tor-fel-mak assured her, knowing full well there was nothing on the age-old bridge that could save them. The entire exercise of going there was futile and had been so from the start. Yet, despite the horrors they had endured during their journey, he still appreciated it. It was far better to have something to do to keep their minds occupied as they awaited the end than to spend their last hours sitting silently in contemplation, anticipating the slow death by suffocation that lay ahead of them.

As the minutes ticked away toward zero, the two Kelar tried to keep Murray occupied with conversation. It was neither sophisticated nor related to their current predicament, but it was enough to distract her from the inevitable end. Only once did the topic of oxygen come up again, when Murray simply remarked that her canister was empty. Now, all she had left was the life-giving air inside her suit, which would quickly become contaminated with carbon dioxide as she took her last breaths.

At first, there was little change. The air simply seemed a tiny bit denser than she was accustomed to, giving her slightly less nourishment than she needed. But with every breath she took, the sensation grew stronger, and she started to gasp. Her breaths quickened in a futile attempt to supply her starving brain with enough oxygenated blood. It was all in vain, of course.

The suffocating blanket of carbon dioxide lay over her like a funeral shroud from hell, draining the life out of her. With the air inside her lungs turning to poison, her vision began to fade, and her head burned with the worst headache of her life.

Est-mar-kort held Murray’s hand as her gasps became more violent. Then, suddenly, they grew irregular and finally ceased altogether. Her body relaxed as death took hold of her, forever sending her away from the world of the living.

They left her there, floating in the middle of the dark corridor. Eventually, the heat of her body, no longer replenished by the life-giving exothermic reactions that had sustained her for thirty-two years, would radiate away into her surroundings, fading away in the cold darkness like snowflakes swept away by the wind.

Author's Note

The story you're reading is one of many set in the Lords of the Stars universe I've been creating over the past 30 years, where familiar characters and places reappear, and new favorites await discovery. Check out my profile to explore more stories from this universe.

Visit the official Lords of the Stars blog for more information about this hard sci-fi universe: https://lordsofthestars.wordpress.com