Belters

Chapter 10:

Chapter 10:AD 2051 Kuiper Belt – John Huss

Errant beads of sweat worked their way from under the helmet and dripped from the tip of Elliot’s nose. “I think we did it… See if you can control the spiders.” Elliot had lost track of time. His fingers and wrists ached from the constant typing of code. He hadn’t worked so hard since he needed to change a few grades to be accepted for a scholarship for one of the better programming schools in New York. If a person proved good at hacking, they could still make up for a youth misspent.

The world lay waiting for the right hacker, holding the correct coding skills. Most companies didn’t appreciate the skill required. Despite the prestige of the assignment, Elliot felt himself woefully underpaid.

If he traveled the path of a Blackhat, Elliot might be a rich man. Like a skeleton key that opened unyielding locks, there were times he felt like a safecracker or possibly Robin Hood. It was for the better he never turned to a life of crime.

Elliot must be out of practice. He should have done it quicker, but the lines of code kept changing as he worked. His eyes were blurry from lack of sleep and caffeine. If he had some Turbo, the task would have gone quicker, but the company frowned on employee chemical enhancement.

Cracking his knuckles in relief, he thought this nightmare might soon be over. With John in control of the spiders, the UI should be able to override the crew’s decisions and stave off the cascading failure and save their asses, and the lives of the crew.

“John, are you there?” Elliot called out to the portrait while he climbed from the AR workstation. At least the ship maintained nominal acceleration, by the feel of the gravity.

He was surprised his body ached so badly. When in the coding zone, time slipped away from him. Elliot was used to spending most of his life working in the reclined position of the AR station. He checked the elapsed time.

Seven hours had passed. He should not be so sore after only seven hours.

“John?” Elliot called out again, stepping to the stash of protein packs hidden in a personal locker. This called for a celebration. “Tell me if it worked.” One sip of the liquid and he stopped. The thing tasted off.

“John…” Elliot spit into his hand, anything to clear the taste, and spotted the blood. Palm rubbed on his jumpsuit leg, the foul mixture disappeared. A few steps later, he sat back at his console.

Helmet on, a few taps on the screen, and he was met with a surging list of system failures. “John, speak to me. What is going on out there?”

The litany of problems cleared, and one word typed a single letter at a time: Error.

“Shit.” Elliot cursed under his breath before coughing up a clot of blood. This quickly joined the phlegm already on his coveralls. The helmet discarded, he tried the backup keyboard and monitors. In a blink, the six flat screens flashed to a steady blue screen with LOS working across them. The signal was somehow lost.

He moved to the exit. Maybe someone else knows what is going on… His escape from the computer core was stopped by the blast door.

“John, I need to get out…” Elliot called into the air.

A single word came back. “NO.” It was John’s voice but filled with an annoying static crackle.

“Please… I don’t feel well… Something is wrong…” Elliot pounded on the door. “Someone help me!” The added stress of feeling trapped gave him a short boost of energy, which he promptly wasted banging on the door in a vain attempt to escape. The computer core was one of the most protected sections of the ship, with nearly as much shielding as a reactor core.

Elliot doubled over in pain. The cramps started in his upper abdomen and worked their way lower. Exhausted, back against the door, arms holding his guts, he let his body slip to the deck. “John… what is happening to me?”

Afraid to admit it, he had a good idea what was wrong. Somehow, he’d received a high dose of radiation. The poison was busy turning his insides to mush. He needed treatment badly. There was still a chance he didn’t receive a lethal dose. If he reached the med bay, Doc would fix him. Doc could fix anything. The miracles of modern medicine.

A haunting voice crackled over the speaker. Elliot couldn’t make out who spoke or what they said.

Maybe someone heard me?

The tech crawled to his couch and, with clumsy fingers, keyed his com unit. “Is anybody out there?” He called into the microphone.

Music started to play, a haunting melody Elliot was certain he’d heard before.

John materialized in the tank next to him. “I’m… I’m sorry, Elliot.” The gaudy swirling background was missing.

The image skipped and rewound like a bad recording.

“I didn’t want—want—want—to tell you while you worked, but we—we—we—found the source of the loss of sensors. During transit, we experienced a spike of some peculiar radiation. It has damaged us badly.”

“How badly?”

The voice shifted, painfully high pitched. “We have sectors damaged, files unreadable. Loss of memory.” The image wavered between old and young John.

Of all the things that could kill in space, Elliot always assumed some random piece of space trash would take him out. Either in a bar, with a knife, or punching through the hull of the ship. At the speeds spacecraft traveled, the slightest impact with a foreign object might spell destruction. FOD, they called it.

Elliot sat on the edge of his couch. “I need to get out… I’m sick.”

“I know… I’m sorry… You need to know, the rest of the crew is dead. The only thing keeping you alive is the shielding protecting my core… and that is inadequate.”

“But… all of them? I heard something outside.” No matter how hard Elliot tried to calm his nerves, too many horror movies flashed into his mind. Someone or something was out there.

The image faded in and out, but the voice remained strong. “The spiders are in our control. They are working to transfer command of the ship to us.”

“But… you are damaged.”

“We need to stop the ship. At our present course, we will accelerate into the inner system like a bullet. We will be a danger to others. If we don’t hit anything, we will fly out the far side of the system and out into deep space.”

“Maybe that is for the better, to leave this place.” Elliot stood. “Please… let me out.”

“Please… sit down… now… going to zero acceleration.”

“No… let me out.”

“I’m sorry, Elliot… I can’t do that. We can’t let more radiation in… It damages us.”

“Please. I’m damaged.”

“We can’t allow the ship to be lost. It is against our programming.”

Without further warning, the perceived gravity disappeared, and Elliot lost contact with the deck. Stranded between the chair and the bulkhead, he had nothing to grip. His body floated free. “Damn it…”

The room spun around him as John executed the maneuver. The overhead shifted to the deck and vice versa.

“Brace for deceleration.”

“One—” Before Elliot finished the sentence, he slammed into the deck headfirst.

The breath in his body exploded from his mouth, spraying a fine mist of blood over the area next to his face. The coughing didn’t stop. Fluid filled his lungs, his breathing became labored, a deep rattle in his chest confirmed his worst fears.

“We are sorry, Elliot. The controls are sensitive. It will take some time to learn how to fly the ship with our degraded memory.”

“You did what needed to be done… I know that. Tell me, what are the chances?”

“Chances of what… what… what?”

“That some beautiful alien swoops in at the last moment and saves me…”

“We are sorry. Very slim, we should gather. Should we calculate it for you?”

“Don’t waste your processing time… What about God…? You think there is an afterlife to look forward to?”

“Possibly. Unfortunately, we have never met God, so we can’t say if there is or isn’t…”

“I know… Will it hurt?”

“What?”

“Death.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t know. I didn’t die. I was uploaded before my last breath. I wish I could offer more comfort. You need to strap in. We will be maneuvering for a heavy deceleration burn.”

“John… you said I instead of we.”

“We know the difference. It is simply hard to separate the two of us… Now we are one.”

His eyes wandered over the six screens that acted as his backup to the VR suite he normally worked in. “Unknown radiation abnormality.” The words flashed on the center bottom screen directly in front of Elliot.

“No, shit.” The words were more of a cough and sprayed bloody spittle over the screens. Elliot closed his eyes and drifted off.

The last words his brain registered were “Goodbye, Elliot, I will miss you.”

AD 2100 Inner Belt – Daniel Frazier

Dying in a spacesuit crusted with his own filth was not how Jacob planned to check out. If he had any say in it, he wanted to die of old age peacefully in his sleep, maybe even lying next to someone soft. He never thought he would be so lucky.

Once Ava had carted her ass off to the med bay, Jacob had a list of things he needed done. Finished with their guest in the hold, next came the time to remove as much of the funk-filled suit as possible. No matter how cold it was, he couldn’t take the smell of his body any longer. If he was going to die, he might as well be as comfortable as humanly possible.

Never a mech, he knew enough to not kill himself jury-rigging a few quick fixes. The portable heater from the suit out area was better in the crew’s quarters. That would be their last line of defense against death.

Free of the nasty suit and with the heater running, Jacob huddled next to the glowing coils. The space heater did little to knock the chill off the crew’s quarters. With luck, it would keep the area above freezing until the batteries ran out. He needed the med bay, but with a crew of nine, the Frazier only carried a single treatment unit. He never risked the thing.

After a lifetime of doctor appointments, with zero improvements in his condition, Jacob had an unhealthy disdain for all things medical. He often joked, “There is a reason they call it practicing medicine. Doctors don’t know shit.” His expectations for surviving the impending encounter with the med unit remained low.

He passed the time floating in the microgravity. He tried to limit his movements. With each shift of position, the fabric scraped against his skin, sending bolts of pain along each nerve ending. From the radiation exposure, his body had sprouted a covering of stinging blisters, many of which popped during the return to the Frazier. He ached all over.

“This reminds me of camping during the Martian summer.” Ava returned from the med bay, floating into the cold room. Her breath was visible with each word. She still wore her work suit, with the helmet and gloves removed.

Jacob remained focused on the heat, wrapped deep in thought about their limited chances of survival.

“We’ve been exposed to something… some source of cosmic rays. The med unit didn’t identify the type.”

Her words confirmed his worst fears. They had been dosed with a high level of ionizing radiation from an unknown origin. If the ship’s computers were operational, he might learn the source. For now, they needed to rely on handheld computers that were powered down during the event.

He nodded. “I thought as much.” He risked a look at her. Despite the treatment, she looked little better than a corpse. Dark circles under her eyes. Pus-filled blisters covered most of her face. With her still suited up, he guessed her body was covered like his.

“How did you know?” Ava asked, “You some kind of quack doctor?”

“When you spend your childhood in a wheelchair, you read a lot or go insane.” Jacob hunched over the heater, soaking up as much heat as possible. With little feeling in his legs, he was worried they might freeze and he’d never know it.

“That’s some weird s**t for a kid to read…”

“I was a weird kid.” Jacob chuckled. “There was a time I was certain the Earth would die in a nuclear fireball. I wanted to know the best way to survive when they dropped the bomb.”

“The nuts still might do it. From what I hear… plenty of crazies left on Earth to wipe it out.” Ava joined him at the source of their limited heat.

He drifted to the side, giving her some room. “Yeah, I know.”

“Any idea to the cause?” She didn’t raise her voice like he expected her to. For once, she left off the word attack. “Think it might happen again?”

“I don’t know.” The short sentence answered both questions, but he went on. “The universe is full of things we don’t understand. Last I read on gamma-ray bursts… Well, science hasn’t answered the question yet. Normally, they are too far away to affect us… We can barely find the short ones before they end. If this happened near our solar system and was a wide beam…” Jacob didn’t want to think of the worst case. It was too horrific.

Ava kept her voice steady. “You’re saying, everyone… we might be all that’s left?”

“Highly unlikely, but… things could be worse than what we are experiencing.” He cleared his throat. “Some people think a nearby gamma-ray burst could end life on Earth.”

“How nearby?”

“Anywhere inside the Milky Way…”

“Shit.”

“Yeah… the universe is full of monsters most people don’t even know exist.”

“Wonderful.” Ava didn’t need to elaborate.

Jacob was pretty sure she felt as shitty as he did. It wasn’t just the sickness. If they survived this event, there was a real possibility a good portion of the human race died with the crew of the Frazier.

One at a time, the words came from his throat. “We are still alive.” He wasn’t sure if the sentence did any good, but felt it needed to be said, nonetheless.

Ava smiled. “Listen, if we turn out the lights, will we glow?”

Jacob wanted to laugh, but his heart broke. There was only so much bad news a person could take. His tank was nearly full of s**t. “I don’t think it works like that…”

She stared at the ceiling, blinking her eyes. “Damn it, I got something in my eyes.”

“Yeah, I can understand that.” He knew she fought hard to keep it all together.

“I think the patches are going to hold. We need to get power back…” She motioned with her head. “Go get treated before your frank and beans fall off. If there is a world left to return to, you might want your junk still intact. Med computer says I should live if I receive proper treatment in a hospital… soon… Kids are out of the question.”

“There’s something to look forward to…” he said the words and regretted them. “I mean the living part… not the kids.”

“Yeah, I figured that. Now is not the time to dwell on the shitty hand the future has waiting for us.”

Jacob paused before asking, “You in a better mood… knowing you’re going to live?”

Ava sighed, “Can’t we enjoy the good news for a few seconds before you ruin it?”

“Why do you say that?”

“The way you started that question… I know bad news is coming.”

Jacob pushed off from the heater and floated to his rack curtain. “Don’t be mad.” With a smooth action, the curtain pulled back. Inside lay the disabled corporate armored suit, stuffed into the small space.

She let out a deep sigh. “And the happiness is gone… You just couldn’t let them rot in the cargo bay?”

“We both know they would die out there.” Jacob waited for her to attack the broken suit.

Her attention returned to the glowing coils and the heat they offered. “They might be dead already.”

Maybe the meds helped keep her calm. “If they are gone, we didn’t kill them.” He let out a soft exhale of relief. He didn’t want to fight his friend over another’s life.

“Any signs of life?”

“None yet.”

Ava started to remove her spacesuit. “Well, damn it, if we have one more to keep alive, I’d better see if I can get the reactor and engines started, or we will all be dead soon, anyway.”

“You got any idea how to fire either up?”

“Not a clue. You didn’t happen to read about modern Bolo engines or fusion reactor startup as a kid, did you?” The top half of her suit cracked from the bottom, and a disgusting smell filled the cabin. “I probably should have done this in the suit-up area.”

Before Jacob thought up a wisecrack, a whooshing sound grabbed his attention. Behind him, the helm of the corporate space suit split like a clam. Light blue goop oozed from the crack, coating a good portion of his rack. The jelly parted to reveal an unconscious woman’s face, slick from the muck.

“Dafuk?” The torso of Ava’s suit floated free. She pushed to get a better look at the crap that floated in glops from the black suit.

Rather than complain about the mess, Jacob tested the ooze with an outstretched finger, rubbing it between his finger and thumb. “I have read about this stuff. I bet it is an oxygenated fluid to reduce the shock of high-G maneuvers.”

“What?” Ava pushed back, trying to stay clear of the crap.

He held up a finger for her to inspect. “You breathe this instead of air. Keeps your insides from being crushed during high-G combat.”

“You’re kidding me.” She didn’t try to hide the look of disgust.

He inched closer to the cooperate security enforcer. Searching for signs of life in the woman, he mumbled a silent prayer over her.

She coughed the fluid from her lungs and into his face.

“Looks like she is alive.” Ava snorted, “You know you deserved that, bringing her on board.”

“Help me get her out of this suit.” He ran his fingers inside the rim of the helm, looking for the controls that surely needed to be there.

Ava shook her head. “I’m not helping you with some twisted sleeping beauty fantasy. She can stay in the damned thing for all I care.”

“You rather have her wake up and still have powered armor on?”

“Good point.”

Jacob couldn’t find any recognizable controls.

“You need to get to medical. I’ll look after sleeping beauty here.” Ava slipped next to him. “I can get a woman out of her clothes when I need to.”

Jacob paused. “Don’t kill her. She might come in handy.”

“Don’t worry, I’m not that bloodthirsty. Besides, we get her out of the armor, we can always pitch her out the airlock later.”

Jacob wasn’t sure whether Ava was serious or not, but at least she went from a crime of passion to premeditated murder. That wasn’t much of an advancement in her thinking, but he’d take whatever he could get.